Sure. Well, first off, I am the President and CEO of The Internet Marketing Center, which you can find online at www.marketingtips.com. We specialize in showing people how they can drive tons of targeted traffic to their web sites and how to turn that traffic into sales and profits. We provide all the information you need to learn how to market your business online, in the form of home-study courses, books, video and audio tapes, and more.

What really sets us apart from all the other marketing courses, though, is that we give you the concepts AND the software tools you need to promote and automate your business on the Internet. And we do all of this based on our own real-world tests and experience, not just theory. In other words, we do it and prove it BEFORE we teach it. This is how we are able to guarantee your results.

Actually, that brings up a good question: Why, exactly, is your "Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet" course so successful? Aren’t you leading this market space?

I did everything myself -- built the site in HTML 1.0, learned how to use FTP programs, figured out how to build a banner, and things like that. Those were the days when Netscape 1.0 had just come out and there was no such thing as secure real-time online ordering. It was all so new and exciting!

I was glued to my computer 24 hours a day testing all kinds of wild and crazy marketing ideas to see which ones worked. And I can tell you that 95 out of 100 ideas failed, but the ones that did work, worked like crazy! Within 18 months I had the #1 best-selling car book online... and it's been #1 ever since!

When people started seeing that my counter had logged over 1,000,000 visitors at CarSecrets.com, they started asking how I was marketing it. They wanted to know how such a simple and basic site was generating so much traffic, and if I could teach them how to do it. Before too long I realized that I wasn't able to teach people everything I knew during a one-week consulting contract.

So I decided to "brain dump" everything I knew into a course, which I called "The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet." It taught just about everything I knew with real-life examples of exactly what I had tested, what worked, and what didn't. That was what set my course apart from every other Internet marketing course out there -- that I had actually tested and proven my techniques. Other courses were just teaching fluff and theory.

By promoting the course with the exact same techniques I was teaching, it became the #1 best-selling Internet marketing course online within three months. Since then, it has been through four new versions -- it needs to be updated regularly as the Internet changes so fast! But through all this time, it continues to be the #1 best-selling Internet marketing course online.

Because we're so far out in front of the curve as to what's working and what isn't, we have also been able to develop some of the world’s leading Internet promotional and automation software. Basically, we developed software that we needed for our own business. We made sure it was the best and then made it available to our clients. This has helped us become one of the world’s leading Internet marketing companies helping small to medium businesses drive traffic and make more sales.

So, what specific suggestions do you have for someone interested in getting started marketing on the Web?

Wow! That's a huge question and, to be blunt, there's no way I could answer it in just a few minutes. In fact, that's why I wrote a 1,000-page course in the first place... There are literally hundreds of tips and suggestions for building a successful presence online. There is just so much to know if you want to do it right the first time. However, there is one tip that is more important than any other...

Get educated. Don’t think you can put up a web site and have traffic appear from out of nowhere. It does not work that way. Spend the time to educate yourself about how everything works. Research your market or idea and learn how to identify a niche market on the Internet. Create or market products that solve other people’s problems.

Another thing to look at is your competition. How big are they? What are they doing right and wrong?

Learn from people who practice what they preach -- find people that you KNOW are successful on the Internet and model yourself after them. Don’t try to re-invent the wheel and don't listen to people who cannot prove that they have done what you are trying to do.

There are so many "wannabes" out there who write books on web site promotion but don't even have a successful Internet business themselves. Find someone who you know is successful and use them as a mentor -- that's what I did. I had mentors, too.

Why do you feel that so many people who attempt to create an income on the Internet fail to do so?

Whoa, another loaded question! There are so many reasons, but here are the main ones. Bear with me, this will be a long answer:

Deciding on a product before finding a market is a big one. This is probably the most common mistake. If you are asking “What is a good product to sell online?” you are making this mistake right now! You need to decide on a market first.

The Internet makes it very easy to find people interested in a specific category like gardening, hunting, aeronautics, accountants, or any other interest group. Just about any group is easy to locate and target online through web sites, newsgroups, e-mail discussion lists, e-zines (electronic magazines), etc.

You have to make sure you have a captive audience, then find out what they are having a common problem with. If you can come up with a product or service to solve that problem, you have a guaranteed successful business. It's really that easy -- that's how all my businesses were built.

You don’t even really have to “sell” it, because you already know they want it before you launch your web site. And since you already know exactly where your customers are, it's easy to target them. I mean, it’s a no-brainer once you think about it.

Now, let’s turn that situation around for a second. Say scientists had found a cure for the common cold. You'd become a millionaire selling it online, right? Well, not necessarily! How do you find people that are sick online? You would have to market to the general Internet community to try and find the 1 out of 10,000 people that are sick that day. It would cost a ton of money to market to 10,000 people just to find one qualified buyer!

And to make matters worse, if you are selling this over the Internet, by the time you ship them the pill through the mail, they'd probably be over their cold! So by choosing the product instead of the market, you can actually fail no matter how great your product is.

Your course has a lot of information about generating traffic. Is that a big hurdle for online businesses?

Many people think they can build a web site, submit it to the search engines, and the buyers will come. The logic is that there are hundreds of millions of people online surfing around and that some of them are bound to stumble onto your product. Wrong! Search engine ranking is more competitive than ever.

Yes, there are secret ways to get high rankings in the search engines and we spend more than 40 pages in our course showing you how to do it. It is probably one of the most complex marketing techniques out there. There are lots of different options for grabbing high rankings. You can do it all yourself, or you can buy really good positioning software, or even hire specialized companies to do it for you.

The course even recommends which positioning software you should be using, as there is a lot of junk out there! The same with Search Engine Optimization companies -- most have no idea what they're doing. So my course shows you how to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

The real key is to know what your potential buyers do online. Are they searching online for a specific term? Are they visiting specific web sites all the time? Are they subscribed to topic-specific e-mail lists or e-zines? In other words, you need to know where your target market is “hanging out” online. If you can find where your potential buyers are, this is where you should spend your marketing and advertising money.

The second biggest psychological obstacle is fear of failure. Never fear failure. Heck, we fail every day. The key is to fail small. In fact, your ticket to success is failing regularly! Every time you fail, you're eliminating bad ideas and getting closer to the things that work.

If you aren't failing, you are not learning. We test new ideas, new prices, new marketing strategies, new looks, new products every month! Most of them fail, and we expect that. And we don't call it failure, we call it testing.

We are just looking for the five winners out of every 100 small failures we have, because what we learn from the winners we apply to everything we have. Here's a perfect example: We don’t even send out an e-mail to our opt-in list without testing at least four versions of the e-mail to see which one performs the best -- that is how much you have to test. Some pull in 200% better results than others with small changes, so it's definitely worth it.

Speaking of results, what kind of results should people expect when they are just starting out?

Don't get discouraged if you don't see immediate results. This is another huge psychological barrier faced by many new entrepreneurs. Some people expect their business to be successful immediately and their dreams to come true overnight. It usually doesn't happen that way.

An Internet business is like any other business -- it takes work. The only difference on the Internet is that you can automate a lot of repetitive chores... and you can test and roll things out WAY faster than an offline business could.

Things generally start slow -- that is to be expected. But when it snowballs, it snowballs VERY fast! And you really have to be prepared, because the Internet moves at seven times the speed of offline business. If you do things right, you can easily grow 700% faster than any offline business just due to the speed of business on the Internet.

Think of it this way: if you had just 30 people a day sign up for a newsletter, that adds up to over 10,000 subscribers in a year. This means that your company now has a database of 10,000 highly targeted leads to market your products to. If you were to purchase a list of 10,000 targeted leads (who have never even heard of you before and may not be receptive to your product), it could easily cost you up to $5 per lead.

So just by attracting 30 new people a day, you've created an asset that is worth around $50,000. Sometimes, even if it seems like things are moving slowly, you're actually building something great! I hope that makes sense.

If you could tell someone just one thing about how to be a success in marketing on the Web, what would it be?

That’s easy! Learn how to drive targeted traffic to your site inexpensively and the rest will all come. Once you've got the traffic, you can change the design of your site, you can test different prices, and you can even change products if your product isn't selling well. Without traffic, nothing you do will make your online business a success.

Now, don't get me wrong! You still have to sell a real product to real people for real money. You can't just build a site, promote it, and try to think of a way to make money after the traffic comes. That was what killed all of the so-called "dot-bombs" a couple of years ago.

So simply attracting lots of general traffic isn't necessarily a good thing?

General traffic is fine, but traffic targeted to your specific niche market is much, MUCH better. In my experience, finding a niche and selling to it is the single easiest route to profitability online. If you are trying to sell books or CDs online, forget it -- Amazon.com will crush you. Those markets are gone.

However, if you target your market to a specific interest -- say gardening, hunting, cars, or whatever -- it's easy to find people online with an interest in those things. All you have to do is find what that market wants and give it to them. I have a lot of clients that make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year who just started their businesses a short time ago and almost all of them make their money by having specific products that go over well in a very targeted niche market.

Check out a newsletter I have called www.SecretsToTheirSuccess.com -- your readers have got to check this site out. It is cool because it shows how people that were in low-paying or dead-end jobs are now making it huge online now, working their own hours and making profits they couldn't even dream of before. We interview two new people every month that are making between $30,000 and $2 million in profit online each year.

Check out the site and you'll see what I mean. You can learn so much by reading about how they started their businesses from scratch not too long ago and made them successful by targeting a specific niche market. For example, one interviewee makes over $1,500 a day selling a plan to bald guys on how to regrow their hair. And another guy sells tools to make wire jewelry and makes $40,000 a month!

These products would be a flop if you sold them at a local storefront because the market in a local area is way too small to support them. But on the Internet, you have access to a global market that can support extremely obscure products and ideas… and be very profitable!

Corey, I wanted to ask you about search engines. How important are they to the marketing beginner?

What is the most important thing someone needs to do when starting out with a marketing project?

Test, test, and then test again. Never stop testing everything. You want to test your advertising, styles, colors, etc. Test your offer, test your price, test different types of advertising. The key is to test small. If it works, apply it to everything you know.

Start small and test. It is pointless to spend all your cash on a huge ad campaign when you have not proven that your web site can sell a product. And you must be able to track what is going on with your web site. I'm shocked by how many people don’t know their "visitors-to-sales ratio" -- how many visitors you get daily compared to how many sales. If you don’t know this, how can you try different things to see what improves your sales?

Can you give an example of this?

Sure. Let's say that your site gets an average of 500 visitors a day and you sell an average of five products a day. Your "visitors-to-sales ratio" would be 100 to 1. (In other words, for every 100 visitors, you can expect to make one sale.)

Now that you know this, you can start testing different things. Let's say that you decide to test a new headline and find that you now sell one product for every 50 visitors to your site. You've just doubled the profit potential for your site! And you never would have known unless you had taken the time to track the activity at your site. I teach this in much more depth in my "Insider Secrets" course.

Listen to this: Back in the early days of marketing my "Car Secrets Revealed" book online, I decided to try out a couple of new slogans. I had a hunch that the one we had been using wasn't targeting the right people. Anyway, after a couple of days of testing, I discovered something that literally changed my life.

I had been marketing the book to car owners, assuming that most people who owned a car would be interested in the book. Well, one of the slogans was targeted towards people who were thinking of purchasing a new car, not to people who already owned one. I just about hit the floor when I saw the results from the test on that slogan! Our sales had literally increased 400% overnight!

If I hadn't always been testing things, even back in the early days, I would never have realized this. That's the power of testing. It has allowed me to build an incredibly successful business.

Based on your experience, testing probably thousands of different strategies, what are the two most powerful ways to market your business on the Internet?

The answer is very simple... affiliate programs and opt-in e-mail marketing.

First off, affiliate programs are the single most cost-effective, least risky way to do business on the 'Net. Affiliate programs are like having an army of joint venture partners out there working for you twenty-four hours a day.

With an affiliate program, it's easy to recruit hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people to promote your product, and you do not pay them a penny unless they make you money! I started one of the very first affiliate programs on the Internet, even before Amazon.com, and I currently have over 70,000 affiliates, so I'm speaking from experience here.

For those who don’t know what an affiliate program is, this is how it works: Basically, you get other sites that share your target audience to link to you. Those links are tracked by special software so that if anyone clicks through the link and buys your product, you give a commission to the referring site.

The great thing about affiliate programs is that they are pure profit machines. Because you only pay your affiliates when they send you a visitor who actually buys something, it's literally impossible to lose money! Even if they drive 10,000 visitors to your site, you don't pay them a dime unless someone buys.

That sounds great. But managing a large affiliate program is a huge job, isn't it?

The best part is that if you are using the right tools you can completely automate the entire process. You can be running a multi-million dollar company with only a few staff in the office. We have over 70,000 affiliates promoting our products on the Internet and it literally only takes us a couple of hours every month to manage our program using our AssocTRAC software. At the end of the month we hit a couple of keys, it prints out the commission checks, and we mail them to the affiliates.

There are no overhead costs, no employees, and no hassles. You only pay your affiliates when they bring you business, and the software does all the work for you. And the whole thing only costs about $45 a month to run! This would be absolutely impossible offline, but the speed and scope of the Internet allows us to do it at almost no cost.

When we built the second generation of AssocTRAC software, we compiled over five years of first-hand experience so that our customers could apply this powerful strategy to their business without having to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of time it took us to develop it.

I could talk about affiliate programs all day, as it is a huge topic, but since we only have a limited amount of time, I'm going to recommend that if you are interested in learning more about how affiliate programs work and how you can start one of your own, visit our AssocTRAC web site.

Could you tell us a little about the second strategy you mentioned: opt-in e-mail marketing?

The second marketing strategy that every e-business definitely needs to employ if they want to be successful is opt-in e-mail marketing. And to get started building an opt-in e-mail list you NEED to be collecting e-mail addresses at your site. I can't stress this one enough. If you aren't doing this, you need to start right now!

Here's how it works: You need to offer every single visitor to your site a reason to leave you their e-mail address. It can be for a free newsletter, a free report, a demo version of your software, a contest... Any reason you can think of to get people to leave you their e-mail address.

If someone visits your web site and actually takes the time to subscribe to your newsletter by giving you their name and e-mail address, this obviously means that they are interested in what you have to offer. Congratulations! You have just captured an incredibly hot sales lead!

By simply following up with these people and e-mailing them quality information and facts, you will instantly build your credibility by developing the rapport that is needed to close sales.

The bottom line is this: Most people are simply not comfortable shelling out money the first time they visit your web site. Unfortunately, the Internet is a big place, so the chances of them finding you again once they leave your site are pretty slim. By capturing their name and e-mail address, you can guarantee that they will not forget about you.

What are some things that people should keep in mind when sending e-mail promotions?

First and foremost: The names and e-mail addresses you collect on your web site should be treated like gold and never abused. If you constantly e-mail these people with blatant advertisements and plugs for your products and never actually send them any valuable information, you will ruin any chance you have to sell to them in the future.

Also, opt-in e-mail is impossible to manage unless you have the right tools and information. In my "Insider Secrets" course I have almost 200 pages of cutting-edge information on this topic alone that will show you how to build an extremely responsive opt-in list very quickly and then show you how to follow up and sell to these targeted customers again and again and again.

We use a powerful e-mail automation tool called Mailloop that automates all of our e-mail promotions. I personally started using this software over 6 years ago and it quickly became such an indispensable part of my business that I actually bought the rights to it from the developer