A quote for the aspiring entrepreneur...
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat." --Theodore Roosevelt

We hope you enjoy issue twenty five of the Entrepreneurs' Chronicle!

Download Ryan's Presentation from the 2005 CEO Conference in Orlando: "How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales: Before You Graduate" [ Download Here ] Feel free to post on your own web site, send to colleagues, or use excerpts with attribution in your own presentations

1. News Update
2. Welcome to Issue Twenty Five
3. Report from the CEO Conference in Orlando
4. The Axiom of Value in Permission-Based Email Marketing
5. Update from Ryan's Poverty Blog AntiPovertyCampaign.org
6. New Email Marketing Whitepaper by Ryan Allis
7. Content for Your Web Site
8. August Discussion Forum Highlights
9. Recommended Book List for Entrepreneurs
10. Updates from Ryan's Blog
11. Featured Organization of the Month: American Red Cross
12. Closing Notes
13. Recommended Products & Books
    

Broadwick passed 3150 clients for its permission-based email marketing software IntelliContact this week. Our team continues to grow as we passed 20 full-time employees this week. We welcomed Michael Best and Charlie Schmidt to the team since the last issue. We are very excited to bring them on board! We currently have an open position for a QA Engineer.

Our new whitepaper "Best Practices for Email Marketers" is a 31 page guide to building strong relationships with your clients and prospects through permission-based email marketing. Written by Broadwick CEO Ryan P. M. Allis. [Download Now Free]

Virante continues to grow and expand its client-base offering strategic web marketing consulting to high potential start-ups and established Fortune 1000® organizations looking to launch a new brand or build online sales. If you need any assistance with search marketing, CPC management, link building, online ad spend management, or email marketing campaign development contact contact Malcolm Young at myoung@virante.com or (919) 386-0133.

Sales of Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales hit a record high in October. Key endorsers include Jay Levinson, author of Guerilla Marketing and David Chernow, President of Junior Achievement Worldwide. We encourage you to discuss the book in our entrepreneurship forum. Buy your copy of the book now from Amazon for just $10.85.

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

In the first article I talk about my time at the Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Conference that I just got back from Sunday night. The second article, "The Axiom of Value in Permission-Based Email Marketing" discusses the critical importance of providing value to your subscribers within your email newsletter--and what happens when you don't.

Finally, we have an update on my new Anti-Poverty Blog, an update on the Zeromillion.com Discussion Forum, a section 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

Report from the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization Conference in Orlando
by Ryan P. M. Allis

Ryan P. Allis, 21, is the author of the book Zero to One Million, a guide to building a company to $1 million in sales, and the founder of www.zeromillion.com. Ryan is also the CEO of Broadwick Corp., provider of the web-based email marketing software IntelliContact and CEO of Virante, Inc., a web marketing and search engine optimization firm. Ryan is presently on leave from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is a senior economics major and a Blanchard Scholar. [ learn more ].

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

The Axiom of Value in Permission-Based Email Marketing
by Ryan P. M. Allis

For the last 100 years, companies have relied on traditional advertising in the form of catchy jingles, TV commercials, billboards, print ads in newspapers and magazines, direct mail, hot air balloons, and waving mascots. The technique is to interrupt a radio listener, TV viewer, or magazine reader with an attention grabbing ad that compels the consumer to buy the company’s product or at least have the product closer to the forefront of his or her mind next time the individual is making a buying decision.

In most instances, advertising is acceptable to the consumer. Most people don’t mind seeing ads while watching television, listening to the radio, or reading magazines—or at least they understand that these ads are necessary in order to receive the content they are seeing, reading, or hearing. While technologies like TiVo, DVR, and satellite radio are challenging advertisers to come up with new methods of advertising, other technologies such as Internet television require users to watch a 30-second advertisement prior to the start of a show. The point is, as long as value is provided, consumers will be willing to be exposed to a few advertisements.

This same axiom holds true online. As long as your web site provides content that people value, visitors will continue returning to the site even if there are a few banner ads or Google AdWords boxes within the page layout. While some web sites, such as WSJ.com, have successfully switched to a subscription-based model, many more web sites rely on banner, box, skyscraper, and contextual advertisements to earn the bulk of their income.

The same axiom, that as long as value is provided, consumers will be willing to be exposed to a few advertisements, also holds true with email. As long as one provides value—whether by providing content on a topic a recipient is interested in or a discount off a product related to one purchased previously—people will allow you to continue to contact them. Each and every email you send of course contains your logo, information on your products and services, and links to your web sites. These items are the advertising and should be surrounded on all sides by the items which make the communication actually add value to the lives of your readers.

Spam however, by its very nature, breaks the axiom. Unsolicited bulk email very rarely has any value. Spam is usually irrelevant, always impersonal, and rarely helpful. Everyone with an email inbox knows how aggravating it is to sort through forty new emails to only find two that are from persons you know. While spam may make money for persons in Eastern Europe promoting fake Cialis, I feel strongly that sending spam will always have a net negative impact on any legitimate organization.

For this reason, we strongly recommend only sending permission-based email, also known as opt-in email. Permission-based email marketing can be an extremely effective way to increase visitor-to-sale conversion rates, build strong relationships with your customers, and turn your one-time buyers into lifetime product evangelizers who recommend your organization to everyone they know. Permission-based email marketing allows companies to develop and sustain relationships with their prospects and consumers by creating value. Permission marketing is about “turning strangers into friends and friends into customers” as Seth Godin likes to say.

The nature of permission marketing—building a relationship with a prospect or expanding the relationship with an existing customer over time—allows you to concentrate on the prospects and customers who are really interested in what you have to sell and are more than willing to become repeat customers.

Ryan P. Allis, 21, is the author of the book Zero to One Million, a guide to building a company to $1 million in sales, and the founder of www.zeromillion.com. Ryan is also the CEO of Broadwick Corp., provider of the web-based email marketing software IntelliContact and CEO of Virante, Inc., a web marketing and search engine optimization firm. Ryan is presently on leave from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is a senior economics major and a Blanchard Scholar. [ learn more ].

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

In September I started a new blog at AntiPovertyCampaign.org so I would have an outlet for my passion of finding ways to reduce poverty in developing counties. Check it out www.antipovertycampaign.org. Below are some of the topics I've discussed so far. If you want to contribute to the blog just email me at ryan [at] virante.com and I'll set you up as an authorized contributor.

Topics To Date:

1. Join The Anti-Poverty Campaign Team
2. John Edwards Has It Right About Poverty, Mostly
3. Props to UNC-Chapel Hill for Having their Own Live 8
4. A $23 Lesson in Selling
5. The List of Leaders -- Which Ones Will Take Action?
6. What a quote by Sachs!
7. Props to CNN for covering "A Global Summit with President Clinton"
8. UN Millenium Development Goals

Our new whitepaper "Best Practices for Email Marketers" is a 31 page guide to building strong relationships with your clients and prospects through permission-based email marketing. Written by Broadwick CEO Ryan P. M. Allis. [Download Now Free]

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 ryan@zeromillion.com.

48 Articles - Authorized Excerpts from Zero to One Million

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

Members: 1132
Posts: 1516
Location: http://www.zeromillion.com/talk/

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

• Entrepreneurs - Head the Call
• One Life To Live, So What Are Your Goals?
• How Would You Convert $100,000 to $200,000?
• Getting Business Deal Advice
• Using a Lawyer to Trademark Our Name
• Marketing Using PPC
• A New Business Idea
• Studying Macroeconomics
• Survey for my Business Idea
• Member Introductions
• Handmade Jewelry Biz
• Want to start e-biz but no ideas
• What is a broker?
• Young Man Looking for Guidance in Entrepreneurship

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
• 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
• Zero to IPO by David Smith
• Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
• Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing by Robert Kiyosaki
• New Venture Creation by Jeffrey Timmons
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• The E-Myth by Michael Gerber
• 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

Follow the journey of young entrepreneur Ryan Allis as he builds his second company, Broadwick Corporation to one million dollars in sales, publishes his first book, Zero to One Million, travels the country as a web marketing consultant and speaker on young entrepreneurship and personal development, launches his non-profit organization, and lives the life of a bootstrapping entrepreneur. Read Ryan's Blog Now.

Last month Ryan posted updates with the titles of:

• Internet 2.0
• Presentation: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales
• Broadwick's Corporate Values

You can read the blog now at http://www.ryanallis.com/blog/.

Since its founding in 1881 by Clara Barton, the American Red Cross has been the nation's premier emergency response organization. As part of a worldwide movement that offers neutral humanitarian care to the victims of war, the American Red Cross distinguished itself by also aiding victims of devastating natural disasters. Over the years, the organization has expanded its services, always with the aim of preventing and relieving suffering. You can help the victims of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma and the Pakistani Earthquake by making a financial gift to the American Red Cross which enables the Red Cross to provide shelter, food, counseling and other assistance to those in need. Call 1-800-HELP NOW or visit https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation-form.asp.

Past Highlighted Organizations:

August 2005 - Grameen Foundation
July 2005 - Oxfam International
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 five of The Entrepreneurs’ Chronicle. We'll see you November 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. The newsletter is sent using the IntelliContact 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 is web-based email marketing and surveying software that makes it easy for organizations of all sizes to add a newsletter sign-up form to their web site, send out personalized HTML or text emails, create unlimited lists, schedule messages, and view complete reporting metrics for each campaign including open and click-through tracking. IntelliContact 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 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 call toll-free 1-877-968-3996.

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