1. News Update
2. Article 1: Dot Com Crash 2.0 - What's Fundamentally Different This Time Around
3. Article 2: Building Your Own Affiliate Program
4. Featured Organization of the Month: Carolina for Kibera
5. Content for Your Website
6. Audio of First Seven Chapters of Zero to One Million
7. Powerpoint Presentation Downloads
8. August Discussion Forum Highlights
9. 25 Recommended Books for Entrepreneurs
10. Updates from Ryan's Entrepreneurship Blog
11. Updates from the Anti-Poverty Campaign
12. Connect on Facebook or LinkedIn
13. Closing Notes
14. Sponsors

IntelliContact 4.0 was released on August 11, making it possible to create, send, and track email newsletters, blogs, and RSS feeds in one central web-based tool. IntelliContact now has over 5,600 customers for its email marketing software. Read press release. Adrian McMullan came aboard as the newest Customer Service Rep in August. Brett Lewis and Justin Rauschenberg will be joining the IntelliContact team in September. CEO Ryan Allis spoke at the Duke MBA Marketing Symposium on August 30, joined by executives from American Express, Johnson & Johnson, Procter and Gamble, and IBM.

Virante continues to 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 and is now accepting new clients. If you need any assistance with search engine optimization, CPC management, link building, website development, online ad spend management, or email marketing campaign development contact Malcolm Young at myoung [at] virante.com or (919) 459-1088.

Sales of Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales hit a record high in August. The book is being represented by agent Rick Broadhead of RBA Literary agency. Rick is working to find a top-class business book publisher to help expand distribution of the book into mainstream bookstores. Key endorsers include Jay Conrad Levinson, author of Guerilla Marketing and David Chernow, President of Junior Achievement Worldwide. We encourage you to discuss the book in our entrepreneurship forum or listen to an audio introduction. You can buy acopy of the book from Amazon.com for just $10.37.

The Anti-Poverty Campaign is an organization founded in September 2005 to consign absolute poverty to the dustbin of history by 2025. We invite you to the site to read and participate. Recent contributions have come from team members in Argentina, Kenya, Mali, Uganda, and Botswana. Contact allisr [at] broadwick.com if you'd like to write for the Anti-Poverty Campaign Blog.

Dot Com Crash 2.0? What's Fundamentally Different This Time Around
by Ryan P. Allis, CEO of IntelliContact

A couple weeks ago my business partner in IntelliContact, Aaron Houghton, asked me via email what I thought about the Squidoo concept--Seth Godin's new web site that allows users to create "lenses" of high-quality content on every conceivable topic while sharing ad revenue with content contributors or the charity of their choice. I replied to Aaron that I thought the idea was "Rather brilliant. Make money off of adsense from hi-quality user generated content. Not sure how they?re doing, but ran into the idea about 8 months ago." Aaron responded to my email with:

"I agree, the concept is great. The proof will be in the value actually created for advertisers, which may be good but it of course is yet to be determined. If he can simply get a critical mass of users and visits we both know someone will buy it or sign a huge ad contract with the site. Isn?t this the exact premise behind the dot com crash, visitors = success? and all of these business are back in that battle again, and VCs are funding them. What?s different now? Is Google Adwords good enough that it has monetized the web traffic business so effectively that .com model businesses can now thrive? If so, what really caused the bubble to burst? It wasn?t a lack of advertising options. Was it simply missing the concept of targeted conceptual advertising which actually drives advertiser value, or has consumer and business spending increased so much online that it?s now viable for the first time?"

Aaron was asking a key question--what is it that is so different now with the web that is going to allow these web 2.0 services to actually generate real revenue and provide real value to users, measurable return to advertisers, and a smart acquisition for acquirers? As the CEO of a Web 2.0 software company, the answer to this question certainly interested me. Further, as the author of an article on the causes of the Dot Com Crash back in 2003, I thought it might be time to take a new look at the question. So here was my response to Aaron:

So what?s different this time around? Here's my take:

1. The Internet has more than 3 times as many users. In March 2000 the Internet had 304 million users according to Internet World Stats and Nua Ltd. As of June 2006 the Internet had 1.043 billion users.
2. We?re all on broadband now. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, as of February 2003, only 33% of U.S. Internet users were on a Broadband connection. This number increased to 68% as of February 2006.
3. Web technologies are developing that are making sites/web tools more useful or interesting causing people spend a lot more time online including services like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, MetaCafe, Meetup, LinkedIn, BoingBoing, Digg, Flickr, Squidoo, and Xanga. In the same Nielsen/NetRatings report linked to above they noted time spent online increased from 51 minutes per day to 61 minutes per day between February 2003 and February 2006.
4. There are developed ad networks like Adwords, Miva, MSN Ad Center, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Federated Media that have large enough scale to make it easy for anyone to get targeted, well paying advertisers with just two lines of code.

The web is finally ready to grow up.

After reading this response, Aaron added an additional insight:

5. The average American Internet user did not trust the Web enough to place frequent large purchases online. Think about how few banks had online banking during the bubble era, that?s the most basic of trust extensions for the average consumer and it wasn?t even close to mainstream then. Trust is one of the primary pillars of web 2.0. The mainstream consumer didn?t inherently trust Web sites in 2000, now they do. So, the mainstream consumer was dumping money in their personal stock portfolio into web companies but was unwilling to buy a product from one of these company?s sites because they didn?t trust buying from the company online.

So there you have it--five reasons why the Web is just that little bit more resilient now that is allowing e-retailers, web-based services, and social networking sites to generate real critical mass sufficient to actually create sustainable business models. Don't get me wrong, the fact that there is a lot less media hype, much smarter individual investors who remember getting burned just a few years ago, and more experienced management teams that realize they actually have to generate revenue and eventually profits somehow is certainly helping as well. But the significant growth in the scale, depth, speed, usefulness, and ease of the Internet has been critical and is today making the web startup a fun place to work again with a real chance of getting acquired or going public one day and making a $580 million price tag for MySpace actually seem not rich at all. Cheers to that!

Like this essay? Read more.

Ryan Allis is the CEO of Broadwick Corporation, a provider of email marketing software IntelliContact , and CEO of Virante, Inc., a Durham, North Carolina based web marketing consulting firm. Ryan, who is 22, is currently taking time off from 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

Building Your Own Affiliate Program

An Excerpt from the book Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to One Million Dollars in Sales by Ryan Allis

Once you've finished the links campaign for your informational site, it is time to get your affiliate program running on your product site. An affiliate program is simply web based software that tracks the source of referred visitors to your site through cookies and databases, and then connects with your shopping cart to calculate commissions to the referring affiliate when a visitor they referred in the past ends up purchasing your product(s).

As stated above, affiliate programs have been very useful for Internet entrepreneurs. It seems that not a single successful online company is without one. Between August 2001 and November 2001, I was able to build approximately 1200 affiliate partners for the nutraceuticals company I worked with. By March of 2002, these partners were bringing in over $45,000 in additional sales to the company each month. The company was able to greatly expand its sales reach and position itself on thousands of related web sites all without spending any money in advertising costs until the sale had already been made.

The first step in launching your program is to obtain affiliate software. I have used three different software packages in the past, AssocTrac, My Own Affiliate Program, and a custom-developed package by Preation, Inc. For a list of my current recommendations for affiliate programs and other software, you can visit http://www.zeromillion.com/webmarketing/web-marketing-software.html. You can expect your affiliate software to cost around $1000 plus a per month fee. While it is not inexpensive, if you can properly build and promote your program your return on investment will be many times this amount.

Once you've purchased your software, installed it, and ensured that it works with your shopping cart and merchant account, you'll need to decide on the level of commissions you will pay. Most programs pay between 15% and 35% of each sale. Keep in mind that the higher you pay out, the more affiliates you will attract. However, if you are losing money on each sale, it will not matter to you how many affiliates you have. Once your commissions are set, you?ll need to create banners and images for your affiliates to use. You can visit www.guru.com, www.smarterwork.com, or www.elance.com to find freelancers. You'll also need to create a guide explaining how to link to your site, instructions on how to view sales statistics, a sign up form, and sales copy encouraging affiliates to sign up. When you have all this done and have tested everything, you can begin to promote your program.

To promote your program, follow the same general method that was used in contacting link partners. Use the search engines to find related web sites and contact them via email and phone to encourage business owners to partner with your company. You can also use automated software that will go through the search engines for you to build a list of related sites or join an affiliate network like LinkShare or CommissionJunction.

Once you have this list, contact the potential affiliates. Encourage them to learn more about your program at your site. And, as always, be sure to follow-up about a week later. One often gains more affiliates on the follow-up that the initial contact. Many affiliate program owners have a great affiliate program but fail to promote it. During the eight to twelve weeks you are waiting for your search engine rankings to come in, it is a great time to promote your affiliate program. You should be able to build at least 200-300 affiliates during this time frame, depending on your product and the commissions you are offering. This should be enough affiliates to get a steady stream going of a few sales each day.

Once you have a couple hundred affiliates and a few months of data, you can go after larger partners that can bring in $10000 per month or more in sales. First, determine what your overall visitor to sale conversion rate is on your site. Using this data, figure out the average payout per visitor sent to you. If you can show empirically that it makes financial sense for larger companies to partner with you, you'll have a much easier time convincing Manage to take on the risk and establish an alliance with your company. To establish these larger alliances, you may have to increase your commission, sign contracts, guarantee minimum payouts, and get on planes.

Like this essay? Read more.

Ryan Allis is the CEO of Broadwick Corporation, a provider of email marketing software IntelliContact , and CEO of Virante, Inc., a Durham, North Carolina based web marketing consulting firm. Ryan, who is 22, is currently taking time off from 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 with links active

Run by Kenyans and advised by American and Kenyan volunteers, Carolina for Kibera's primary mission is to promote youth leadership and ethnic and gender cooperation in Kibera through sports, young women's empowerment, and community development. Additionally, CFK works to improve basic healthcare, sanitation, and education in Kibera. To learn more or get involved visit http://cfk.unc.edu/.

Past Highlighted Organizations:

August 2006 - Global Giving
July 2006 - Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
June 2006 - Kauffman Foundation
May 2006 - Skoll Foundation
April 2006 - Nourish International
January 2006 - Youth Social Enterprise Initiative
December 2005 - Youth Social Enterprise Initiative
November 2005 - American Red Cross
September 2005 - American Red Cross
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)
February 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

If you have a website that has to do with business, entrepreneurship, marketing, web marketing, ebusiness, personal development, or economics and would like high quality free content for your website, you may syndicate the following articles from our website. 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 just ask that you notify us by emailing ryan [at] virante.com.

• 48 Articles - Authorized Excerpts from Zero to One Million
• 45 Articles - Articles by Ryan Allis, June 2002 - July 2003
  

Download Ryan's Presentation from the October 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 website, send to colleagues, or use excerpts with attribution in your own presentations

Download Ryan's Presentation from "Creating a Life of Purpose, Passion, and Prosperity" presented at Danville Community College in April 2005. [ Download Here ] Feel free to post on your own website, send to colleagues, or use excerpts with attribution in your own presentations

Members: 6587
Posts: 2025
Location: http://www.zeromillion.com/talk/

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

• Staring a business at 16?
• Business Opportunities
• Great Ideas
• High School Senior Project! Can anyone Help?
• College based business ideas...
• Good Books on Entrepreneurship
• Free Entrepreneur's Dictionary - Guide to Start-up Business
• what can i do after i get a entrepreneurship degree?
• New to the forum
• How do you verify large numbers of addresses and phone number
• Want to learn how to have an online business?
• Student Entrepreneur
• What's the exact definition of "Entrepreneurship?"
• Where can I get the information I need for my business plan?
• Increasing the Lifetime Value of Your Customers
• CPC & CPM Advertising
• Opinions on Content Idea for a Business
• How to be indexed via Google?
• What would you do?
• BPO at Japan
• Young Entrepreneur Needs Help With Funding
• high school biz suggestions
• Business Opportunities
• How to Start Your Own Nursing Agency, Nurse Registry
• Become a Wholesaler
• How to Become a Wholesaler
• Affordable Way to Drive Traffic to Your Site
• The Reality of Online Entrepreneurship
• Homeworkers and Franchises Needed
• Entrepreneurs - Head the Call
• One Life To Live, So What Are Your Goals?
• A New Business Idea
• 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.

Globalization & Economics

1. The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas L. Friedman
2. The Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw
3. Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal by Ball and Dagger
4. The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L Heilbroner
5. Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan
6. The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman

Entrepreneurship

1. Zero to One Million by Ryan P. Allis
2. Zero to IPO by David Smith
3. Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
4. Rich Dad's Guide to Investing by Robert Kiyosaki
5. New Venture Creation by Jeffrey Timmons
6. Good to Great by Jim Collins

Marketing

1. The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rosen
2. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
3. Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
4. Purple Cow by Seth Godin
5. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
6. Protégé Training Program by Jay Abraham
7. Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson

Personal Development

1. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
2. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey
3. Succeed and Grow Rich Through Persuasion by Napoleon Hill
4. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
5. The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons by Napoleon Hill
6. The Student Success Manifesto by Michael Simmons

In September of 2005, 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 countries. Check it out at 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 allisr [at] broadwick.com and I'll set you up as an authorized contributor.

Want to stay up to date on the APC? Just add our RSS feed to your feed reader.

Topics To Date:

1. Last Days in Uganda - Rafting the Nile & Experiencing Jinja
2. Tales From Uganda
3. If Everyone Lived Like You, We'd Need 11.6 Planets
4. A Follow-up to Poverty Does Not Equal Unhappiness: What would you need in your life to be happy?
5. War in Uganda and the Kampala Slums
6. Traveling in the Rwenzori Mountains, Uganda
7. A Letter from a Zimbabwean in Botswana -- Working to Overcome Lack of Equality of Opportunity, Seeking Seed Capital
8. HIV and Income Generation in Uganda
9. A Few Words from Kampala
10. First Report from Uganda: Lost Luggage & Cafes With Prostitutes
11. Off to Aspen to Talk about Globalization & Poverty at Brainstorm 2006
12. Buenos Aires Garden Project Completed
13. The Net Effect of Hispanic Immigration on the North Carolina Economy and Tax Base
14. Cooking, and the Hopes and Dreams of Buenos Aireans
15. Comparing Paris to Mali
16. Getting Malaria in Mali
17. The People of Mali, Excision Research, and Grassroots Development Aid
18. Excision, Midnight Swimming and Rain in Mali
19. Poverty Reduction in China: Stiglitz Says Don't Leave it On Autopilot
20. Skoll World Forum
21. Traveling in Mali
22. Is A Japanese Cow Worth 3.5 Times an Average Human?
23. The Rhetoric of Bono Can Be Powerful
24. Fortune Brainstorm Response: The Biggest Problem in the World
25. The Relative Efficacy of Aid vs. Trade
26. Parasites, Forced Marriage, and the AIDS Conspiracy
27. Getting Sick in Mali
28. Homelessness, Unemployment, and Microfinance in Mali
29. Sickness, Friendliness, Men, and Zoos in Mali
30. Health, Malian Women, and Feminism
31. Food, Bribery, & Climbing in Mali
32. Is Your Child Worth $3.83?
33. Mali Update
34. First Week in Mali
35. Dispatches from Mali
36. 2006 World Economic Forum
37. The $91 Billion Conversation
38. Video on Microfinance
39. What Would God Think?
40. Economics is the "Sexiest Trade Alive" According to Newsweek
41. Some Success in Hong Kong is Good News
42. The WTO and Farming Subsidies
43. The Relative Value of 37 Million Americans Against 3000 Million Non-Americans
44. The Role of the Youth of Africa in Reducing Poverty
45. The Top 8% of the World's Wealthy
46. Interesting West Wing Presidential Debate
47. Our Mission -- Ending Extreme Poverty in Our Lifetime
48. One of My Favorite Quotes
49. Join The Anti-Poverty Campaign Team
50. John Edwards Has It Right About Poverty, Mostly
51. Props to UNC-Chapel Hill for Having their Own Live 8
52. A $23 Lesson in Selling
53. Props to CNN for covering "A Global Summit with President Clinton"
54. A great comment in today's Financial Times
55. The List of Leaders -- Which Ones Will Take Action?
56. UN Millenium Development Goals

Follow the journey of young entrepreneur Ryan Allis as he builds his second company, Broadwick Corporation to ten 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 or add the RSS feed to your feedreader.

Recently Ryan posted updates with the titles of:

• The Difference Between People Who Talk The Talk and Those Who Execute?
• Super Friends Introductions
• When I Was 21
• Official Launch of IntelliContact 4.0
• Launch of Intellicontact 4.0 Beta
• The World Cup's Ability to Transcend Culture And The Conversation that May Change U.S. Environmental History - McCain and Khosla (Final Day at Brainstorm)
• The View from the Eisner Ranch
• A Bus Ride With Steve Jurvetson
• Off to Eisner's Ranch for Dinner
• Brainstorm Day 1: What do Ethanol, 50 Cent, Paris Hilton, Poverty, Global Warming, the intent of the Framers of the Constitution, and the Arabic version of The Vagina Monologues Have in Common?
• Brainstorm attendees met on the flight over
• Moblogging From O'Hare - The Best Ad Campaign in Terminal C
• Off to Fortune Brainstorm 2006 - I'll be Blogging It...
• Limited Beta of the Best Email Marketing Product in the World
• NC IDEA Funding
• TBJ 40 Under 40 Responses
• Liberation from 800x600
• April Entrepreneurship Chronicle
• Fortune Brainstorm
• It's Coming
• AOL & Yahoo Not Charging to Send Emails
• Audio Downloads of the First Four Chapters from Zero to One Million
• The 20 Most Important BusinessLessons I Learned in 2005
• Been Up All Night
• Need Your Vote for BusinessWeek's Top Entrepreneur Under 25

You can read the blog now at http://www.ryanallis.com/blog/ or add the feed to your feedreader.

	Are you a high school or college student with a Facebook account? If so, Ryan's on Facebook too. Just look up Ryan Allis (the one at UNC-Chapel Hill). Send Ryan a message or a friend request.
	Ryan also uses LinkedIn. If you want to connect to Ryan on Linked in just look him up and send a connection request to allisr [at] broadwick.com.

Don't have Facebook or LinkedIn but still want to ask Ryan a question? Feel free to email Ryan at allisr [at] broadwick.com. Thank you!

This concludes issue thirty-three of The Entrepreneurship Chronicle. 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 [at] virante.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 email marketing software.

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"I studied the lives of great men and famous women, and I found that the men and women who got to the top were those who did the jobs they had in hand, with everything they had of energy and enthusiasm and hard work" - Harry Truman, former U.S. President