April 2005
13,437 Subscribers
Issue Nineteen

"This is the beginning of a new day. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever; In its place is something that you have left behind. Let it be something good." - Author Unknown

We hope you enjoy issue nineteen of the Entrepreneurs' Chronicle!

Table of Contents

1. News Update
2. Welcome to Issue Nineteen
3. The Need for Quality Incoming Links
4. 100 Steps to Building a Company to $1MM in Sales
5. Free Content for Your Web Site
6. March Discussion Forum Highlights
7. Recommended Book List for Entrepreneurs
8. Featured Organization of the Month: Opportunity International
9. Closing Notes
10 . Recommended Products & Books

News Update

Some recent news for Ryan's companies Broadwick and Virante is listed below.

Broadwick Corp. is now up to 1877 clients for its permission-based email marketing software IntelliContact Pro. On Sunday, April 3rd Broadwick will launch IntelliContact Pro v3.0 which will feature list segmentation, sequential and date-based autoresponder and many additional features. The company has recently added employees Kevin Otte and Charles Sune to the team.


Virante continues to provide web design, web marketing, and search engine optimization services to its growing list of clients. Virante has recently added Russ Jones to the staff allowing for expanded services in graphics design and web development. If you need any assistance with link building, web site design, web site redesign, email newsletter creation, web marketing consulting, custom software development, affiliate program design, ecommerce, or search engine optimization, contact Malcolm Young at myoung@virante.com or (919) 386-0133. You can now order link packages directly at http://www.virante.com/services/.

Sales of Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales hit a record high in March. Key endorsers include Jay Levinson, author of Guerilla Marketing and David Chernow, President of Junior Achievement Worldwide. We encourage you to discuss the book and the general topic of building a company to $1 million in sales in our entrepreneurship forum.


Welcome to Issue Nineteen

We hope you enjoy this month's informative Chronicle!

This issue discusses the importance of building quality incoming links to your site and provides 100 steps you can follow to build your own company's sales to $1 million and above. In the first article, "The Need for Quality Incoming Links", we take a look at how a proper Link Building Campaign can not only provide a site with a solid page rank, but can also be a critical element in obtaining top search engine positions for competitive keywords. The second article, "100 Steps to Building a Company to $1MM in Sales", lists for us the 100 steps, that when properly applied, have been proven to take a business over the $1 million dollars in sales mark. The article lays out for the reader a step-by-step guideline on how to market your product successfully and grow sales of your product. Finally, we have sections that provide free content you may use on your web site and a list of our book recommendations for current and aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders.

If you have any comments, suggestions, or would like to contribute content to be published in the newsletter or online, I encourage you to contact us at myoung@virante.com. Please do feel free to forward this newsletter on to your colleagues and associates. On behalf of the Zeromillion.com team I thank you for being a subscriber.

Yours entrepreneurially,

Ryan P. M. Allis, founder
http://www.zeromillion.com
The Top Entrepreneurship Resource Online
Author: Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales

The Need for Quality Incoming Links

The Need for Quality Incoming Links
by Ryan P. M. Allis

Why You Should Consider Building Incoming Links to Your Web Site

There has been much debate over the past few years as to the value of incoming links. Over the past few months, I have noticed posts in discussion forums of leading web marketing portals such as WebProWorld, Crea8asite, and WebmasterWorld claiming that building incoming links is “in decline” an “utter waste of time” and “will kill your PageRank.”

My goal with this article is to explain what does work in link building and add to the body of evidence showing that executing a proper link building strategy is a critically important part of obtaining top rankings for highly competitive search terms on the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search. I will first provide a bit of background history to explain why quality incoming links are so important, then provide a listing of the top rankings my company Virante has obtained to date for its clients on highly competitive terms. I will then describe the process of building links, how to determine how many links one needs, and how to decide whether to build links in-house or outsource the link building.

Before we get any further into the article, let’s take a look at the results Virante has been able to obtain over the past year for ten of its clients' web sites.

What type of results have we obtained for our clients by following our link building strategy? Here’s a partial list accurate as of April 1, 2005:

#1 for entrepreneurship in Google and Yahoo
#1 for spring break in MSN
#1 for email marketing software in Yahoo
#1 for business broker in Yahoo
#1 for acne treatments in Google and Yahoo
#1 for acne products in Yahoo
#1 for fibromyalgia treatment in Google
#1 for facial skin care in Google and Yahoo
#1 for colon cleansing in Google, Yahoo, and MSN
#1 for constipation in MSN
#2 for constipation in Google and Yahoo
#2 for email marketing software in Google
#2 for progesterone in Google
#3 for make up in Google

Here are the sites we obtained these positions for, the number of PR4+ links built to each site, and each site’s unique visitor count during March 2005:

The Position Results Following a Proper Link Building Strategy

Examples of Results Following Proper Link Building Strategy
Domain
Links Built
Results
Unique Visitors Mar. 05
http://www.zeromillion.com
300
#1 in Google for entrepreneurship, #1 for buyer behavior; #1 in Yahoo for entrepreneurship, #1 for young entrepreneurship, #2 for market positioning; #2 in MSN for financial ratio analysis
89357
http://www.email-marketing-software-resource.com
250
#2 in Google for email marketing software, #3 for email marketing
12174
http://www.acne-answers.org/
300

#1 in Google for acne treatment, #10 for acne; #1 in Yahoo for acne products, #3 for acne treatments, #2 for acne prevention; #1 in MSN for acne treatments, #1 for acne prevention, #2 for acne products
7964
http://www.business-broker-resource.com
165
#1 in Yahoo for business broker; #2 in MSN for business broker
6080
http://www.fibromyalgia-support.org
200
#2 in Yahoo for Fibromyalgia treatment; #2 in MSN for Fibromyalgia symptoms, #3 for Fibromyalgia treatment; #8 in Google for Fibromyalgia
8478
http://www.make-up-cosmetics.com
250
#4 in Yahoo for make-up; #4 in MSN for make-up; #3 in Google for make up
11501
http://www.skin-care-support.org
250
#2 in MSN for skin care, #1 for facial skin care; #1 in Yahoo for facial skin care; #4 in Google for Skin Care
8063
http://www.menopause-pms-progesterone.org/
300
#2 in Google for progesterone, #6 for PMS
13495
http://www.colon-cleanse-constipation.com/
350
#1 in Google, Yahoo, and MSN for colon cleansing
4234

A Bit of Search Engine History to Explain Why Quality Incoming Links Are So Important

Now that you’ve seen the results we’ve been able to obtain using our strategy of building quality links, let us take a look at some history as to why exactly building incoming links is so important.

In November 2003, Google had its last major algorithm update. At the core of the current ranking algorithm are factors such as keyword frequency, content freshness, title tags, alt tags, and header tags which fall under the category of “on-site optimization” as well as the quantity and quality of incoming links which is known as “off-site optimization.” Prior to 2000, when search engines such as Altavista, AllTheWeb, Hotbot, and Lycos were the market leaders, on-site optimization was the most important factor.

During these times, by making certain easy changes on a web page such as repeating your targeted search term multiple times in your content, adding the search term to your meta tags, and putting the term in your alt, title, and header tags, you could fairly easily obtain a top ranking in the major search engines within just a month or two. For quite some time, all it took to obtain a top ranking on highly competitive search terms was just repeating the term over and over on your page, having specialized search engine text in white on a white background, or feeding the search engine spiders one page and your visitors another easier to read page.

Google’s rise to popularity in 2000 and 2001 changed all this. Now, instead of easy to implement keyword frequency changes and meta tag stuffing you had to focus on a whole new aspect. It was no longer just about what was on your page, it was about what other web sites had to say about your page. Link popularity came into play. Now, the easy to implement changes were much less useful and your site’s reputation had much more bearing on what rankings it could obtain. Other sites had to link to your site. The search engines viewed every web site that linked to your web site as a vote of confidence. The more votes of confidence and the more votes of confidence from related web sites that had lots of votes of confidence themselves, the better your site could rank. Thus, the incoming link building industry was born.

In 2001 and 2002 the search engine optimization companies that survived the industry shift learned the new rules of the game and found out that although it took a lot more work to get a top ranking, it was still fairly predictable and formulaic. Numerous link building consultants sprung up and companies like Virante found that after about three to four months they could obtain a #1 ranking in Google for any search term no matter how competitive if they built the right number of links.

The SEO industry was thrown for a second spin however in November 2003 when Google modified the rules with the integration of the Hilltop Algorithm into their general ranking formula. The update caused quite an uproar among webmasters, small online business owners, and search engine consultants alike as a large number of high quality web sites went from being ranked in the top ten for competitive keywords to no longer being listed in the top 10,000 results. The update was thus appropriately named the “Florida Update” after the mess that followed the Florida vote in the 2000 Presidential Election. You might remember my article at the time “Google Goes Bananas: Is Florida Update the Beginning of the End for Google?” Fortunately, by January, most rankings had returned to normal for quality web sites.

What this update essentially did, however, was two things. First, it made links from “expert documents” (documents on a specific topic that had a lot of incoming links from other web sites on that same topic) very important. Now instead of the weighting in the Google algorithm being approximately 60% link popularity and 40% on-site optimization, it was 40% link building, 40% expert document links, and 20% on-site optimization. Link building had actually become more important, not less. Secondly, any site built after February 2004 now had to wait a longer period of time before it could rank well in Google. The waiting period that was previously only three months became nine months.

Both of these changes were made by Google for one purpose—to improve the relevance of search results for its users and to reduce low quality listings using “black-hat” SEO techniques to quickly obtain top rankings. Google figured that if it put new sites in a “sandbox” where they could “play around while they mature” that the incentive to build dozens of low-quality web sites as a strategy to obtain top rankings would be reduced. Hence relevancy would be increased and sites would actually have to have high-quality links and a good amount of quality content to obtain a top ranking on a competitive term. Google didn’t exactly publicize that it was putting into effect the Hilltop Algorithm changes and Sandbox Effect. In fact, most of the SEO industry did not actually realize the changes Google had made until mid-Summer 2004. Finally, however, the industry (and the businesses and organizations who banked on using organic search engine optimization as a way to build visitors and sales) breathed a sigh of relief in December 2004 when the first web sites built after February 2004 began appearing in Google for their targeted terms—setting the Sandbox Effect timeline at approximately 9 months, give or take a few weeks, based on when your site first gets indexed.

What Do These Changes Mean in Terms of Getting Top Rankings for Competitive Terms?

Essentially, these changes mean two things. Now, in order to get top rankings you have to go after certain types of link partners and avoid other types. More on this in a moment. Secondly, if you are planning on building a new site from scratch you should get a basic holding page (even if it just says this site is coming soon) up as soon as possible and submit it to http://www.google.com/addurl.html in order to get Google’s nine month watch ticking.

What Links Hurt and What Links Help?

So let’s talk about links for a moment. What you want are incoming links to your web site from other web sites. An incoming link is a simply a piece of hyperlinked text that takes a visitor to a page on your web site when clicked.

Ideally, you want links to you to:

a) be from sites about a topic that is similar to yours,
b) have the actual linked text (what is underlined and blue, known as the anchor text) as your targeted search term,
c) be on a page that has a PageRank of 4 or higher; and
d) be on a page with as few other outside links as possible and certainly under 60 other outside links

It is important to know that providing a reciprocal link back to the link partner is not really going to hurt you. It is true that outbound links do reduce the PageRank of the link that page is on. However, the amount it reduces the PageRank by is so minute that we feel providing a link back to the web site of the site that links to you is the most sensible and efficient method of enticing other web site owners to link to you. It is extremely important to note that links coming from pages that have a PR4 or higher are the only types of links that Google counts. PageRank 1-3 links still help you in search engines such as Yahoo, MSN Search, Ask Jeeves, and Teoma, but not very much if at all in Google. Finally, it is also important to note (and this is where some confusion comes in) that any link to you containing your targeted text in the anchor text on a PR4+ page will be beneficial no matter what the content of the web site is. As long as the page has a PR4+, Google will see the link as beneficial.

The Types of Links You Want to Avoid Having

What you want to avoid, however, are links that are in what is known as bad neighborhoods. A bad neighborhood, by definition, is a grouping of web sites that have been penalized by Google for either following banned SEO practices or offer no valuable content other than a listing of other web sites (a link farm). You can tell a link farm apart from a legitimate links directory by a simple litmus test. If the directory is organized with topical links in the appropriate categories, it is okay to have your list be there. If the pages are simply posting of hundreds of unrelated links that are not sorted in any fashion, Google may view this as a link farm and penalize the web site.

Determining if a Site Has Been Penalized by Google

There is also a very easy method of determining whether Google has penalized a page. First, download the Google PageRank toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. Second, look at the PageRank for each page you go to. If you ever see a completely grayed out toolbar, this means that Google has penalized this page. A completely white toolbar with a PR of 0 out of 10 is okay. This just means Google hasn’t assigned a PageRank to the page yet. And of course any PR bar that has a PageRank and thus has green in it is also fine.

Posts in some of the forums I mentioned at the start of this article have led some people to believe that only links that come from highly related web sites are of value. This simply is not true. Any link from a page with PR4 or higher will help in Google as long as the anchor text contains your targeted search term and any link from a page with a PR1 or higher will help in the other major search engines. While a link from a related web page will indeed be more helpful than one from an unrelated web page, all links from high PR pages with the correct anchor text will be accreditive to your own PageRank and thus improve your search engine rankings for your target search terms.

In review, prior to 2000 it was very easy to obtain top positions for competitive search terms using on-site optimization. In 2001 and 2002 it became more difficult as link building became required to succeed. Today, and since February 2004, link building has become even more important and the criteria for the types of links that are required to obtain top rankings have become stricter. Today, building PageRank 4 or higher incoming links (PR4+) to a web site through a coordinated strategy of reciprocal linking, article syndication, directory submission, and online press release distribution through services such as PRWeb and 24-7 Press Release is a key component of obtaining top rankings on competitive keywords in Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search. A proper incoming link building strategy works hand-in-hand with the on-site optimization strategies (increasing keyword frequency, optimizing the title, alt, and header tags, and increasing content freshness through an RSS News Feed).

Determining How Many Links You Need to Build

Determining how many links you need to build is fairly easy. All you need to do is go to Google and type in the search term you’d like to be #1 for. Then take a look at the URL of the first listing and type in “link:http://www.theirwebsite.com” and click search. This will tell you how many PR4+ incoming links this site has. Do this for the first few listings and you’ll generally see a decreasing trend as the positions go lower. As long as you can match the on-site optimization attributes (title, keyword frequency, etc.) of the first web site listed, all you have to do is essentially build one more PR4+ link to your web site in order to get above this listing. Once your link campaign is completed, it will take approximately three months to see the full effect if your site has been around a while and about 9 months to see the full effect if you’ve only recently started your web site(s).

Should You Build Links In-House or Outsource the Work?

When building links you have three options. You can either do it yourself, have someone in your organization build the links, or outsource the work to a link building firm such as Virante. If you follow the proper methods for finding quality potential link partners, contacting the potential partners, and adding the links you would likely be able to build 30-50 PR4+ incoming links per week working 9 hours per day. If you are just starting out with your business or have a person in-house that you can train to build links it may make sense to do it in-house.

This noted, Virante has a team of four full-time persons who do nothing but find and build high quality reciprocal links. We already know the right places to look to find high quality and related partners, already have a database of 4,000 topic-grouped web sites that have exchanged links with our clients’ web sites in the past, and know how to do the in-depth keyword competitiveness analysis required to determine how many links you need to obtain a desired position as well as what search term combinations would be best to target. Finally, because we build links for so many clients at a time, you can have experts working on your behalf at a cost that would likely be less than the cost of building the links in-house. You can view our link building packages and prices and place an order at http://www.virante.com/services/. Please feel free to direct any questions you may have about links, search engine optimization, web marketing, or web site development to our Director of Client Services Malcolm Young at (919) 386-0133 or by email at myoung@virante.com.


Ryan Allis is the CEO of Broadwick Corporation, a provider of permission-based email marketing and list management software IntelliContact Pro (www.intellicontact.com), and CEO of Virante, Inc. (www.virante.com), a Durham, North Carolina based web marketing consulting firm. Ryan, who is 20, is currently studying at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is an economics major and Blanchard Scholar. Additional information on the author can be found at www.ryanallis.com.

This article may be republished online as long as the byline remains.

100 Steps to Building a Company to $1MM in Sales

Note: This is an authorized except from Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales. Learn more about the book and purchase your copy today from Amazon.com for $10.85.

100 Steps to Building a Company to $1MM in Sales
by Ryan P. M. Allis

I am a big believer in the value of step-by-step guides and reviews. In this section, I’ll review the one hundred most important steps in building a company to $1 million in sales. Do note that the following steps may not be in the exact order and may not apply to every type of business. The steps are customized for the business that is developing a product that will sell initially directly to consumers or directly to businesses
and do not have a lot of money initially to spend on paid advertising. The general order remains, however, and the majority of steps will likely apply to your business.

    1. Come up with a business idea.
    2. Determine what you will sell—your revenue models.
    3. Use the MAR opportunity evaluation model to evaluate that idea.
    4. Research suppliers of your product.
    5. Complete market research and evaluate whether your idea will succeed in the marketplace.
    6. Come up with a name for your company.
    7. Write your business plan.
    8. Complete your pro forma income statement.
    9. Determine how much you’ll need to raise to get your business to cash flow positive—the point where you are making more than you are spending.
    10. Get feedback on and improve your business plan. Go to your local chapter of the Service Corps of Retired Executives and review your plan with them.
    11. Determine your financing strategy.
    12. Determine who will own what percent of the company and discuss if you wish to use vesting (granting equity to initial founders over time based on how long they stay with the company and what they do).
    13. File your articles or certificate of incorporation with your Secretary of State. Incorporate as an S or C corporation if in the United States. Incorporate as a C corporation if you wish to raise investment or sell the company one day. Incorporate online or through your law firm.
    14. Obtain an Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the Internal Revenue Service so you can open a bank account and hire employees.
    15. File form 2553 with the Internal Revenue Service if you intend to be an S corporation.
    16. Have your law firm create non-disclosure, non-compete, and confidentiality agreements and have all involved with your company sign them.
    17. Hold your initial board meeting and sign the Organizational Consent document.
    18. Decide if you want to have a stock options plan and create an options pool.
    19. If you decide to do vesting, have your law firm write a stock restriction agreement, have all involved in your company sign a copy, and then have each person consider filing an 83(b) election if in the United States.
    20. Issue your stock certificates.
    21. Have your law firm draft consulting agreements for any independent contractors and employment agreements for any employees. Sign these agreements.
    22. Open and fund a bank account and order checks.
    23. If you decide you’ll need to raise money, look into the different sources of money, including debt capital from family, friends, or the bank or equity capital from accredited private investors or venture capital firms. If you think you can start out small, bootstrap, and grow organically from revenues, evaluate whether you wish to grow your company in this manner.
    24. If you decide you’ll need to raise the money from private investors, have your law firm create a private placement memorandum and work with you to refine your business plan.
    25. Raise the money you will need.
    26. Purchase small business accounting software such as QuickBooks and keep track of all expenses and revenue, or hire an accounting firm to take care of this for you. You also may wish to outsource your payroll.
    27. Come up with the name for your product(s).
    28. Trademark the names of all your product(s).
    29. Trademark the name of your company.
    30. Develop your product(s), if you will be selling a product. Ask for quotes from different suppliers.
    31. Have a logo created.
    32. Either purchase or lease office space.
    33. Furnish your office with desks, chairs, couches, filing cabinets, and light fixtures.
    34. Purchase needed office supplies such as computers, laser printers, desk blotters, pens, paper cutters, shredders, staplers, staples, paper clips, penholders, envelopes, and stamps.
    35. Purchase any software you will need.
    36. Call your phone company and have them install a phone line or purchase a VOIP system.
    37. Purchase regular phones or install a digital phone system.
    38. Obtain broadband internet access and a wireless router and set up a wireless office network.
    39. Decide what roles you need additional help in and can afford to pay someone to fill, then hire those persons.
    40. Obtain insurance for your business.
    41. Have business cards made.
    42. Have letterhead made.
    43. Have a brochure made.
    44. Design the packaging and labeling for your products.
    45. Have your labeling reviewed by your lawyer.
    46. Print enough labels and packaging for your initial production run.
    47. Obtain a Universal Product Code (UPC) bar code if you will be selling your product in stores or to retailers.
    48. Order an initial inventory of products.
    49. Have professional pictures of your product(s) completed.
    50. Register the domain name for your company site, product site(s), and informational site(s).
    51. Obtain hosting for your web sites.
    52. Establish a free account with a dynamic DNS service such as Sitelutions to make it quick to switch hosts in case a host goes down.
    53. Design your company web site.
    54. Make sure you have log analysis software installed on your site and check your visitor count and traffic details often.
    55. Add sales copy to your web site that is written to first attract attention, generate interest, establish credibility, create desire, and provoke action.
    56. Install a shopping cart on your web site.
    57. Apply for a merchant account so you can accept credit cards on your web site and in your business or sign up with a service such as PayPal or ClickBank.
    58. If you are a service based company, and will be paid via checks, there will be no need to apply for a merchant account. Start doing business right away, making sure to always leave extra business cards with clients in order to leverage word of mouth. You may also want to purchase an ad in the local phone book.
    59. Sign up to an email list management service such as IntelliContact Pro and add a newsletter sign up form to your web site.
    60. Sign up for an autoresponder service and add an eight-day informational ecourse in order to generate leads, build trust with customers, and recommend your product.
    61. If you sell a product nationally or internationally, and not just locally, build an informational web site at a domain with your target keywords separated by hyphens.
    62. Add content to your informational web site. Ask others for permission to syndicate their content and write a few articles yourself to start to portray yourself as an expert in your industry.
    63. Optimize the informational web site for the search engines.
    64. Build a few hundred links to your informational web site.
    65. Add a discussion forum to your informational site.
    66. Wait 12 weeks for your informational site to be in the top of the search engines for your targeted keywords.
    67. Once the merchant account is approved, obtain a gateway such as VeriSign or Authorize.Net and sync your shopping cart or point of sale terminal with it.
    68. Install an autobill/continuity program and integrate it with your merchant account, shopping cart, and affiliate program. Decide on what type of incentive you will give to those who sign up for the autobill program.
    69. Decide what your money back guarantee will be.
    70. Decide what you will charge for shipping.
    71. Start selling!
    72. Sign up for a live person chat so customers on your site can chat with your customer support team.
    73. Consider starting a contest/sweepstakes for your product in order to obtain additional prospect data and leads.
    74. Investigate regulatory issues in other countries and determine which countries you can export your product to.
    75. If you are selling a product, hire someone to fulfill orders or use a fulfillment house.
    76. Establish relations with local media.
    77. Write and mail out a press release to local newspaper, radio, and television media or hire a public relations firm to handle this for you.
    78. While you are waiting for the search engines to update their rankings, purchase affiliate program software.
    79. Install your affiliate program and decide what commissions you will pay on referred sales.
    80. Go through the search engines and trade journals to find potential affiliates.
    81. Contact the potential affiliates in person or via phone, mail, or email.
    82. Build a few hundred affiliates that promote your product(s) for a percentage of each sale.
    83. Start sending out a monthly email newsletter to those who signed up on your web site and to your customers.
    84. Mail the commission checks to your affiliates each month.
    85. Follow-up with your customers once per month to ask how they are doing with your product.
    86. Ask for and add testimonials to your web site and marketing materials.
    87. Look into upcoming trade shows and attend them.
    88. Keep close watch on the search engines. As soon as your informational site is in the top position for your targeted keywords, add a popup to promote your ecourse and your newsletter. Add in recommendations for your product to bring persons over to your product/company site.
    89. Once you have some data on your visitor to sale conversion rate and the amount affiliates are paid per visitor sent to your site, work on building joint ventures and strategic alliances with larger partners.
    90. Consider establishing a wholesale price for your product and looking for distributors of it.
    91. If you decide to offer your product via stores, design and create point of sale items such as a display case and print collateral.
    92. Take a look at the operations of your company and see what areas you can make things more automated or more efficient.
    93. Bring on a bookkeeper to handle your accounting work for you if you have not already.
    94. You may wish to create an employee benefits program if you have not already, to ensure you retain your most valuable workers.
    95. Write a company handbook and begin to establish formal systems and processes. Make things efficient and try not to overload workers with forms and red tape.
    96. Once you become cash flow positive, look into paying for cost per click, newsletter co-registration, print, radio, or television advertising or advertising via direct mail. Keep a close watch on return on investment at all times.
    97. Look into sponsoring athletes or related events or providing your product to high profile persons
      free of charge.
    98. If your product(s) fit the proper criteria, look into creating an infomercial to promote them.
    99. Allocate some funding for research and development and attempt to develop additional products.
    100. Once you have obtained a top ranking in the search engines, built a solid team and efficient systems and processes, automated operations as much as possible, built a thousand or so affiliates who are incented to sell your product, opened your sales channel up to international markets, and started selling to larger and larger distributors you should be well on your way to one million dollars in sales. Congratulations!

Ryan Allis is the CEO of Broadwick Corporation, a provider of permission-based email marketing and list
management software IntelliContact Pro (www.intellicontact.com), and CEO of Virante, Inc. (www.virante.com), a Durham, North Carolina based web marketing consulting firm. Ryan, who is 20, is
currently studying at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is an economics major and Blanchard Scholar. Additional information on the author can be found at www.ryanallis.com.

This article may be republished online as long as the byline remains.

Content for Your Web Site

If you have a web site that has to do with business, entrepreneurship, marketing, web marketing, ebusiness, personal development, or economics and would like high quality free content for your web site, you may syndicate the following articles from our web site. These articles are stored in zip format and can be downloaded by clicking on the appropriate link. We simply ask that you keep the author byline at the
bottom of each article per the instructions included with each zip file. If you choose to use any of the articles we ask that you notify us at info@zeromillion.com.

48 Articles - Authorized Excerpts from Zero to One Million


45 Articles - Articles by Ryan Allis, June 2002 - July 2003

Discussion Forum Highlights

Members: 628
Posts: 801
Location: http://www.zeromillion.com/forums/

In March we saw some great topics come up for discussion in the Zeromillion.com Forums. Some highlighted topics include:

Recommended Books for Entrepreneurs

The following books are recommended for reading by aspiring and current entrepreneurs and business leaders. The books in bold are must reads. Please email any recommendations for additions to this list to myoung@virante.com.

Globalization & Economics

  • The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas L. Friedman
  • The Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw
  • Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal by Ball and Dagger
  • The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L Heilbroner
  • Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan
  • The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto
  • The Other Path by Hernando de Soto
  • Economics by Stanley and Brue
  • Macroeconomics by N. Gregory Mankiw
  • Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph A. Schumpeter
  • International Business by Charles W. H. Hill
  • Against the Dead Hand by Brink Lindsey

Entrepreneurship

  • Zero to One Million by Ryan P. M. Allis
  • Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
  • Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing by Robert Kiyosaki
  • Good to Great by Jim Collins
  • The E-Myth by Michael Gerber
  • New Venture Creation by Jeffrey Timmons
  • The Young Entrepreneurs’ Edge by Jennifer Kushnell
  • The Young Entrepreneur’s Guide to Starting and Running a Business by Steve Mariotti
  • The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship by William D. Bygrave
  • Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker
  • Good to Great by Jim Collins
  • At Work with Thomas Edison by Blain McCormick
  • Multiple Streams of Income by Robert G. Allen
  • On Entrepreneurship by Harvard Business Review
  • Entrepreneurship.com by Tim Burns

Marketing

  • The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rosen
  • The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
  • Obtaining a #1 Ranking in the Search Engines by Ryan Allis
  • What Clients Love by Harry Beckwith
  • Building Thousands of Links to Your Site by Ryan Allis
  • Net Results 2 by Rick E. Bruner
  • Protégé Training Program by Jay Abraham
    Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
  • Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson
  • Principles of Marketing by Kotler and Armstrong

Personal Development

  • Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
  • The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey
  • Succeed and Grow Rich Through Persuasion by Napoleon Hill
  • How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
  • The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons by Napoleon Hill
  • The Student Success Manifesto by Michael Simmons
  • Secrets of the Young & Successful Jennifer Kushnell
  • Soul of Money by Lynne Twist
  • Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins
  • The Millionaire Mind by Thomas J. Stanley, Ph.D
Highlighted Organization of the Month

Opportunity International's mission is to provide opportunities for people in chronic poverty to transform their lives. Their strategy is to create jobs, stimulate small businesses, and strengthen communities among the poor. Their method is to work through indigenous partner organizations that provide small business loans, training, and counsel. Their commitment is motivated by Jesus Christ's call to serve the poor. Their core values are respect, commitment to the poor, integrity, and stewardship. To learn more about Opportunity International visit http://www.opportunity.org/.

Past Highlighted Organizations:

March 2005 - The Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization
February 2005 - United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)
January 2005 - United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
August 2004 - Youth Development & Entrepreneurship Foundation
July 2004 - Lead America
June 2004 - Students in Free Enterprise
May 2004 - Junior Achievement

Closing Notes

This concludes issue nineteen of The Entrepreneurs’ Chronicle. We'll see you May 1, 2005. If you are not subscribed and would like to subscribe, please visit http://www.zeromillion.com. If you would like to contribute content, become involved with the zeromillion.com team, make suggestions, or provide feedback please feel free to contact us at info@zeromillion.com. We encourage you to participate in our discussion forum at http://www.zeromillion.com/talk/.

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Books & Products By Ryan P. M. Allis


Zero to One Million

Guide for aspiring entrepreneurs on how to build a company to one million dollars in sales.

Price: $10.85 | More Info

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Obtaining a #1 Ranking in the Search Engines

The book the professionals use to consistently obtain top search engine rankings.

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"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together."
Vincent Van Gogh