1. Franchising Opportunities
2. News Update
3. Welcome to Issue Twenty Two
4. Update on Ryan Allis' Companies
5. Why Email Marketing Matters
6. Content for Your Web Site
7. June Discussion Forum Highlights
8. Recommended Book List for Entrepreneurs
9. Featured Organization of the Month: Habitat for Humanity
10. Closing Notes
11. Recommended Products & Books

David Siu began working at Virante on June 1. David runs a number of sites. Check out his wine cabinet site, his medical coding & medical billing site, and his secured loans site.

Broadwick Corporation is celebrating its 2nd Anniversary this month! Broadwick has today passed 2300 clients for its permission-based email marketing software IntelliContact Pro. We launched IntelliContact Pro v3.0 in April which includes list segmentation, a multi-message autoresponder, surveying and many additional features.

Virante is excited to welcome Jeffrey Staub to thier team as their newest Link Building Specialist. Virante has unveiled its new Client Results Report. Download the Virante Client Results Report here. If you need any assistance with link building, web marketing consulting, or search engine optimization, contact Malcolm Young at myoung@virante.com or (919) 386-0133. You can now order predetermined link building packages directly at http://www.virante.com/services/. We've found building high quality incoming links to be one of the most effective ways of obtaining top search engine positions.

Sales of Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales hit a record high in May. 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. Buy your copy of the book now from Amazon for $10.85.

We hope you enjoy this month's informative Entrepreneurs' Chronicle!

In the first article, "Summer Update" , I will share with you the progress of my companies and my plans for the future.

The second article, "Why Email Marketing Matters" takes a look at the importance of email marketing and how it directly impacts your bottom line and helps sustain long term client relations.

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

Summer Update

Greetings all. It's been eleven months since the last post. Here's an update on what's going on...

Things at Broadwick are going very well. We are up to 2266 clients for our IntelliContact Pro Email Marketing Software product as of tonight and have 15 full-time employees and two part time employees. Back in December we moved in to a 6300 sq. foot office in Durham / Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. New pictures of each member our team can be found at http://www.intellicontact.com/company/ .

Here is a photo from last Friday of our full team.

Virante has also grown a lot since last year. Although we are spending most of our time focusing on our two largest clients, we have developed into a full search engine optimization, link building, and web marketing consulting firm. Virante is up to eight full time employees.

Check out http://www.virante.com for more information on our search engine optimization services .

At the moment, I am enjoying being off of school. I finished my junior year at UNC in May. I will likely be taking 3-4 years off to continue building Broadwick and Virante in order to take full advantage of the business opportunities we have.

Right now I plan to return to UNC for a year to finish off my economics undergrad degree around 2009 and then head to either Stanford or Harvard for an MBA.

Long term, my goal remains to make a significant amount of money (current goal is $1B) so that I can fund my own foundation down the road that will work to reduce poverty in developing nations through the promotion of techology, entrepreneurship, health, and ethical government and business leadership.

I am also excited about moving into my first house. It is being finished now and will be ready to move into on July 15. It is in Durham, NC about 5 minutes from my office.

If anyone wants to ask me any questions or just share their story, I encourage you to post on the Zeromillion.com Entrepreneurship Discussion Forums .

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

Why Email Marketing Matters

By Ryan P. M. Allis, CEO of Broadwick

According to a study by the Winterberry Group, email marketing brings in $15.50 per dollar spent . This is about 17% more than direct-mail campaigns and 73% more than telemarketing campaigns. In short, email marketing matters and if you're not sending out at least monthly email newsletters to your subscriber base, you should be. The true cost comes from acquiring the prospects and clients, not the three or four hours needed to create a monthly newsletter.

Many organizations, once they have spent the thousands of dollars acquiring their clients, fail to market to their existing base. I've met quite a few marketing managers who would rather continue spending $200 a pop for new qualified prospects rather than $0.01 per person to build the relationship with their existing clients and recommend new products or encourage re-orders. I've found that sending relevant email communications to persons who have requested to receive them is the single most effective way of cultivating the type of relationship needed to turn your prospects into customers and your customers into lifetime product evangelizers.

As a reader of this article, chance has it that your organization is one that already sends out a newsletter, or at least is considering doing so soon. Once you began sending your own newsletter, however, it is important to follow two important rules that will increase your likelihood of achieving your marketing goals, whether they are to increase repeat orders, convert a higher ratio of prospects, or obtain top-of-mind brand awareness.

The first and most important rule is to only send relevant content to persons who have requested it. What does this mean? Well, let's say you are a travel and adventure planning company. If someone has subscribed to your Kayaking Monthly Newsletter, don't move them over to your European Vacations list and send them an article on Dining in Tuscany. In most cases, you will very quickly lose any prospect or reduce the lifetime value of your relationship with an existing client. If the person also subscribed to it, it would be okay to send him or her a monthly company newsletter that from time to time had information on other topics, but don't mix newsletter bases just to increase mailing volumes.

It is important to note that just setting up an interest segment and adding it to your sign up form doesn't require you to create a monthly newsletter on that topic, but once you get a few dozen to a couple hundred people interested in that area (depending the value of the product or service you are providing), it will likely pay to have quality content developed on that topic for distribution in interest specific newsletters. This can be easily done within the IntelliContact Pro email marketing software by either creating a list specifically for persons interested in a topic or creating a segment of persons with a specific interest.

The second rule is to be consistent with your sending frequency. Depending on your type of business and your subscriber interest level, the right volume for you could be weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Once you find the frequency that is right for your organization (and this could vary newsletter to newsletter), stick with it. We see a lot of companies whose email strategy can only be defined as "ad hoc." Rather than blasting out a promotion whenever sales are lagging, we recommend having an emailing schedule for each newsletter and sticking to it, whether it be every Saturday, every other Wednesday, or on the 15 th of each month. As an example our company newsletter, the Permission-Based Email Marketing Monthly goes out on the 28 th of each month.

What type of results can you expect from regularly sending out regular email newsletters? Here are two examples from users of IntelliContact Pro , the email marketing software my company Broadwick provides. Biotage is a company based on Massachusetts that provides DNA sequencing instrumentation. They send out event notifications and company updates to 20,000 or so subscribers each month. David Shultis, Marketing Communications Manager of Biotage, notes, "We've seen open rates at around the 38-42% mark for our large mailings. There has also been a 'pass-along' quality of our emails, as we've noticed new names that were not originally on our mailing lists responding to offers." Another IntelliContact Pro user, Julie Ibrahim, Vice President of the Tiger Sports Shop says "The monthly newsletter keeps us and our inn at the forefront in the minds of our past and potential guests. Thus with the continuous news from us and our region, we are kept in mind, with no sales effort or pressure." If your organization wants to see marketing results like these, it may be time to start or expand your usage of permission-based email marketing.

If you stick with sending relevant, high quality content-rich emails on a consistent basis to persons who have requested to receive your emails, you will increase your prospect to customer conversion rates and customer lifetime value at a fraction of the of the cost of traditional methods and take advantage of the best type of marketing possible—free marketing through authentic customer word-of-month.

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.

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

Members: 801
Posts: 991
Location: http://www.zeromillion.com/forums/

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

• Working for Ryan Allis
• I have a Vast Idea and Quite a Few Questions...
• Do you Utilize Technology?
• Member Introductions
• How would you Convert $100,000 to $200,000?
• Where to Find Capital to Start up an Airline?
• One life to live, so what are your goals?
• Multi Level Marketing

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
• The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
• Fire in the Belly - an exploration of the entrepreneurial spirit by Yanky Fachler

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

Oxfam International is a confederation of 12 organizations working together with over 3000 partners in more than 100 countries to find lasting solutions to poverty, suffering and injustice. With many of the causes of poverty global in nature, the 12 affiliate members of Oxfam International believe they can achieve greater impact through their collective efforts.

Past Highlighted Organizations:

June 2005 - Habitat for Humanity
May 2005 - National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship
April 2005 - Opportunity International
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

This concludes issue twenty of The Entrepreneurs’ Chronicle. We'll see you August 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/.

This newsletter is published by www.zeromillion.com with support from the Entrepreneurs’ Coalition and the Boston University Global Program. The newsletter is sent using the IntelliContact Pro web-based email marketing and list management software.

Comments/Suggestions: myoung@virante.com
Contribute Content: myoung@virante.com
Contact Publisher: myoung@virante.com
Inquire About Services: myoung@virante.com

Archives online at: http://www.zeromillion.com/echronicle/

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

Obtaining a #1 Ranking in the Search Engines The book the professionals use to consistently obtain top search engine rankings. Price: $37.00 | More Info

IntelliContact Pro by Broadwick Corporation is web based software that enables you to send out permission-based email newsletters to your prospects, customers, and subscribers, track campaign metrics such as opens and clickthroughs, and create and send surveys. Manage and contact all of your prospects, customers, affiliates, employees, and suppliers. IntelliContact Pro v3.0 includes the added features of an Autoresponder and List Segmentation. With plans starting at $9.95/month and a free fully functional fifteen day demo, IntelliContact Pro is a top choice for list management software. We encourage you to sign up for a free 15 day trial or learn how IntelliContact can benefit your organization. If you have any questions about the software feel free to contact Director of Customer Service Brad Gurley at (919) 968-3996 or via support@broadwick.com.

Virante provides web site design, web marketing consulting, and search engine optimization services. Learn more and request a quote at www.virante.com.

All Contents Copyright © 2005 by Zeromillion.com, the top entrepreneurship resource online

"If you had one chance, one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted--would you capture it, or let it slip?" - Eminem