Is Your Web Business Worth 300 Million Bucks?

Probably not, eh? To tell you the truth, neither is mine.
(Yet.) But let me tell you about one that is.

Mirabilis. (Means "wonderful, notable, or remarkable")

Mirabilis was purchased in 1998 by AOL for around 300
million bucks. Mirabilis was a small business with only one
software program, but it was worth millions to America On
Line.

So what was Mirabilis' software?

ICQ.

ICQ (I Seek You) software, as you probably know, enables
anyone on the Internet to engage in chats or to personally
contact anyone else who is online at the moment and a user
of this software.

The most interesting part of the story is that Mirabilis
doesn't sell ICQ software. They give it away! For free! It
is available to anyone who wants it. All you have to do is
go to their site or a multitude of other sites and download
it.

As a matter of fact, Download.com reported that for the week
of January 27, 2002, 1,044,176 people download ICQ. And
that's just from their site!

That means that by providing ICQ software for free,
Mirabilis receives over 1 MILLION new contacts for their
company through Download.com alone.

What if your Internet business could get just one tenth or
one hundredth of those results? What if you could receive
just 10,442 new contacts weekly without having to spend a
penny in advertising? Would that help your bottom line?
(Duh!)

Mirabilis is an Internet success story if there ever was
one. They can also be an example of success to us in our own
online businesses.

Although there are lots of web marketing techniques (ezine
advertising, banner ads, Goto.com, et al), the most cost-
effective marketing is free advertising.

The absolute best thing that you can promote online is
software. It is the easiest thing for any small business to
get involved with and possibly achieve the proverbial
"overnight success".

Think about it for moment. What does absolutely every
computer user need? They need software! What has made Bill
Gates the richest man on the planet? Software! If you own a
computer, you buy software!

However, writing software may not be your cup of tea.
Perhaps staring at thousands of lines of programming code
for hours on end doesn't appeal to you. No worries. You are
in good company. It doesn't really appeal to a lot of other
people (including me) either.

The product that runs a close second to software is
information. Information can have a high value and is
low cost to produce. Information can sell for 10 times or
more its cost to produce an distribute. People don't pay
for the number of words you write. They pay for the value
that the information represents to them.

Now, with the Internet, you can sell downloadable
information products. You can set up your site so that when
someone orders online the product is immediately made
available to them for download. Your customers don't have to
wait days to receive their products. They can have them NOW!

The Internet is the greatest instant gratification machine
ever invented!

The value of downloadable information sales doesn't end here
though. By offering the information online, it makes it much
easier to update your products and it eliminates potential
shipping problems.

One advantage of electronic information products is that you
can use a downloadable information product as a freebie on
your site to constantly attract thousands of new prospects
for your paid products and services.

Follow the example that Mirabilis has set: create a free
information product and offer it to thousands of webmasters
to use as a lead generator for their own businesses.

You can come in contact with thousands of potential
customers every week while these webmasters are generating
additional leads or even sales at their site using your
information product as a free bonus. It can be a Win-Win
situation for everyone involved. The webmasters win by
adding more value to their sites. You win by being able to
contact more potential customers.

Nearly 35% of our current business is still being generated
by our free information products that are being given away
on hundreds of sites. It has turned out to be the most
valuable promotion we have ever done.

What does this mean for you? It means that you need to get
to work ASAP producing your own free traffic generator for
your site. Create something that your prospects would be
interested in and offer it for free from your site. I have
tested many different free traffic generators and none of
them have even come close to the results produced by this
one.

What information products to offer? Free eBooks, while so
popular as to be ubiquitous, are now so commonplace that
they're losing their effectiveness, much like banner ads,
whose clickthrough rates have dropped 1600% in the last
couple of years.

An emerging promotional tool that bears investigating is the
e-seminar.