Product Description

Now anyone can be an online millionaire! These days it's easier, cheaper, and safer than ever to start an Internet business using readily available technology and turnkey opportunities. In this strategy-packed guide, Scott Fox reveals the powerful but simple methods he and thousands of others have used to strike it rich on the Net. Exclusive interviews with "mom and pop" entrepreneurs prove how easy it is to get started and build a million-dollar enterprise. Readers get:

* a guide to e-business opportunities, including "instant e-businesses" that require no start-up capital * strategies for making money from home and turning hobbies into businesses * marketing and product tips * legal and financial advice * a list of recommended vendors * years of expertise and experience in one easy-to-use book

Internet Riches also features an action plan for brainstorming new business ideas, and exercises to help readers determine the best moves for their particular situations. Filled with practical pointers and inspiring interviews, it's the most powerful book ever on starting and enjoying a million-dollar online business!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4506 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
In this strategy-packed guide, top e-business consultant Scott Fox reveals the powerful but simple methods for strik­ing it rich on the Net. Exclusive interviews with dozens of "mom and pop" entrepreneurs prove how easy it is to get started and build a million-dollar enterprise. Readers get:

An inspiring guide to e-business opportunities, including "instant e-businesses" that require no start-up capital or technical training * proven strategies for making money from home and turning hobbies into businesses * low cost web marketing and product tips * legal and financial advice * detailed vendor recommendations * years of expertise and experience in one easy-to-use book Internet Riches also offers an innovative action plan for brain­storming new business ideas, and fun exercises to help readers determine the best moves for their particular situa­tions. Filled with practical pointers and motivational inter­views, it's the most powerful guide ever to finding financial freedom online!

Q&A with Scott Fox, author of Internet Riches

A 2007 survey showed that nearly half of American workers aren't satisfied with their jobs. What do you feel is holding people back from going into business for themselves?

People give their hesitation lots of names but it basically boils down to fear. I wrote Internet Riches precisely to help people overcome these fears. Starting an e-business today is much easier, much cheaper, and requires much less technology expertise than most people realize.

Unfortunately fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, fear that the learning curve is too steep, fear that there will not be a payoff for their work, fear that they cannot afford to do it, fear that they won’t be able to live up to their own expectations or the needs of the business combine to keep many people from even trying. It’s sad but true that in an effort to be "rational", these fears often combine to create a self-image where a person can’t imagine themselves building a successful e-business.

The problem is that this fear is based on an outdated 20th century understanding of the risks required to start your own business. As thousands of my readers have found, if you update your assumptions to reflect the realities of how easy it is to start your own business in the Internet Age, the conclusions change dramatically and in your favor.

The facts are plain: online markets are continuing to grow explosively, the costs of the equipment and infrastructure have dropped dramatically, the flexibility of working from home on a part-time basis means that people don’t have to quit their full-time jobs to pursue online success, and the great upside available to people who own their own small businesses have all combined to completely change the risk/reward equation.

Based on your research and experience, what areas have the most potential for growth in the coming years?

I’d put these opportunities in 3 buckets: The first bucket is filled with the obvious growth opportunities such as international markets and the mobile web (By this I mean the evolution of e-commerce into mobile commerce on your handheld device). Continuing explosive growth in these markets offers major profit opportunities.

The second bucket is the mining of niche markets. Because the Internet lets people communicate more easily than was possible in the 20th century, we are seeing the rapid emergence of millions of micro communities based on niche interests. This means that almost any hobby or issue can be used as the basis for a community of like-minded individuals. And anywhere there is a community, there is a market for goods and services which solve the problems faced by that community. The Internet allows entrepreneurs greater ability to service these niche markets cost-effectively than ever was possible before the Internet.

The third area of opportunity is the hardest to quantify but the most explosive: This is where entrepreneurs find new and unexpected ways to exploit the efficiencies of the Web to create new products, services, and markets. When one of these ideas finds particular success, it can spread like wildfire across the web and create very profitable new businesses very quickly. The big success stories like Facebook are very well covered by the media but there are thousands of smaller, millionaire-making e-businesses emerging all the time.

The benefits of starting a niche company are many; work from home, mesh passions with profits, be your own boss, etc. However, what potential pitfalls do niche market businesses need to look out for?

Getting ahead of yourself is probably the most common trap that I see for entrepreneurs. Especially because so many "get rich quick" gurus promise unrealistic returns, entrepreneurs can get hurt by diving too deeply, too quickly into their new passion. So, although one of the best parts of starting a business is turning your own enthusiasm into a revenue generator, this enthusiasm can also blind you to possible flaws in your approach.

Three ways to reduce these risks are:

1. Do your research. This means thoroughly investigating the competition (both online and off), pricing the goods and services needed for operations, and setting a realistic budget up-front for both your money and your time.
2. Take advantage of the new e-business paradigm by keeping your costs down, especially at first. Try a few versions of your business model to learn what works the best. Wait until you have found the most profitable approaches before signing any long term contracts or investing heavily in a new venture. In other words, don’t quit your day job until you have evidence that your new web site can lead to the pay-off you’re targeting.
3. Manage your time, relationships, and expectations with extra care during the start-up period. It can be hard on your family and relationships if you are suddenly working two jobs at once. Just as with your financial budget, you should develop a time line for your projects. Discuss this plan, and its associated trade-offs, with your family to get them on board, too.
These steps can help you keep your enthusiasm from overwhelming your good business sense. They can also help preserve your capital until it can be used most effectively.

You state that venture capital is no longer needed for today's internet start-up. Is this a product of cheaper technology, gun-shy investors, or both?

Venture capital can still be appropriate for capital-intensive ventures or to accelerate an already growing business. But for the niche entrepreneurs reading Internet Riches, it’s rarely needed because all the competition among technology service providers has so significantly lowered the costs and risks of starting an online business.

This trend is driven by competition in the technology sector, not just on the prices of hardware but also on the costs and ease of use of software, plus the economies of scale enabled by the Internet’s penetration into daily life and business operations worldwide.

For example, technologies that 10 years ago required tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and an IT engineering team on staff are now available to small businesses in easier to use web-based versions for a small monthly fee. Server maintenance, software upgrades, and tech support are included. This used to be called Application Service Providers (ASPs) but the latest buzzword is SaaS (Software as a Service). Companies can also source goods with increasing efficiency, pricing transparency helps lower prices, and there are more people online shopping than ever before. These trends combine to lower costs, speed up time to market and increase the profit potential of any new e-business venture.

Cheaper, more efficient and easier-to-use technology has also greatly reduced the costs of infrastructure for setting up a new e-business. Now entrepreneurs can work from home, in their spare time, and not have to invest in office space, parking, furniture, insurance, signage, etc. etc. Most of those "real world" costs that were required to start a business in the 20th century have been eliminated for today’s Internet entrepreneurs.

Technology advancements have also revolutionized advertising. Services like Google’s Adsense/Adwords and Yahoo’s Search Marketing Solutions allow any business to advertise cost-effectively to consumers worldwide from a desktop PC. At the same time, those services can make money for entrepreneurs because they will place paid advertising on even the smallest, newest of web sites for no up-front cost. This gives any niche entrepreneur access to a potential advertising revenue stream previously only available to companies that owned newspapers, TV stations or radio programs.

If a business is less expensive to run, its products are cheaper to deliver and faster to market, and its advertising budget is more cost-effective, then it will also need less capital to get started. The combination of all these increased efficiencies and lower costs means a LOT less risk for entrepreneurs, and therefore less need for venture capital to sustain the business until revenues get started. Entrepreneurs can instead focus on growing their businesses instead of on technology support or on raising money that they may not need. Sorry, venture capitalists!

How important is search engine optimization (SEO) to a budding business?

SEO is a key strategy for marketing success, both for online and ‘real world’ businesses.

In my seminars, I often say "Search engines are the Yellow Pages of the 21st century." You wouldn’t traditionally have started a business without listing your phone number in the phone book would you?

Online is increasingly where the consumers are, so your business needs to be there as highly ranked as possible to attract as much traffic as possible. Today you can pay for prominent listings, just like in the days of the Yellow Pages’ dominance. But you can also get good search engine display "organically" for free. This means carefully crafting your web pages’ appearance, copy, and keywords to attract a high ranking from Google and Yahoo.

Often overlooked is the increasing importance of search engines for "real world" businesses, too. If you have a real world business based on local marketing (like a chiropractor or dry cleaner) you may not need a constantly updated e-commerce web site. But you should put up a basic "brochure" web site that is optimized for search engines. As everyone spends more time connected to the Web, you’ll want to be easily discoverable by your local customers online, too.

Internet Riches has three chapters about online marketing tactics for small business. These "No Budget Online Marketing Secrets," "Small Budget Online Marketing Secrets," and "Real Budget Online Marketing Secrets" chapters discuss "pull" marketing tactics like free organic search engine optimization, as well as "push" marketing techniques like keyword advertising and email newsletter publishing that can help any small business grow its online profitability.

About the Author

Scott Fox (Los Angeles, CA) is the top e-business consultant in Hollywood, where his clients have included Bill O’Reilly and Larry King. He is a frequent speaker on e-business and technology at universities including USC and UCLA, and at conferences such as Digital Hollywood and Internet World. He received a JD from Stanford.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Welcome to the Internet “Gold Rush,” Take Two!

CONTRARY TO popular wisdom and what the media tells you, the Internet is not “over.” The years 2001–2004 were tough for Internet businesses, but the development of the digital economy is still only in the early innings of a nine-inning ball game.

Online sales are continuing to explode and could reach more than $300 billion in the United States alone by 2010.1 This is more than 12 percent of overall retail U.S. sales from a new category of business that hardly existed ten years ago!

For entrepreneurs like you, numbers like this mean that new online business opportunities are actually increasing. That’s because the Internet continues to change so many of the basic assumptions that you were taught about business as its technology gets easier to use and more widespread.

Whether you are a high school dropout or hold an advanced degree from a prestigious university, you are a product of the twentieth century’s “industrial age” education system. This means that (like me) you were probably taught to see corporate employment as a more desirable path than taking the risks of starting your own business.

In fact, when surveyed, 58 percent of Americans say that they’ve dreamed of starting their own businesses, but almost half (49 percent) of them cite “insufficient financial resources” as their primary obstacle.2

My number-one “Internet Millionaire Secret” for you is that the Internet has significantly reduced the costs and even eliminated many of the risks of starting your own business. The arrival of e-business has changed the rules of business so dramatically that now is the best time in history for you to take charge of your life and start your own business.

You should read this book if you are one of the millions of people who want to:

 Change careers

 Exert more control over your career and lifestyle

 Experience the flexibility of being your own boss

 Explore the potential of working from home

 Pursue a creative business idea or two (or at least try to develop one)

Times Have Changed (in Your Favor!)

In the twentieth century, starting a business was risky and expensive, but the Internet has changed the equation. Unfortunately, the bad first impression left by the dot-com collapse of 2001 still dominates popular understanding, our education system, and media coverage of e-business. The opportunities to start profitable new e-businesses have never been better. Yet lately, when the media covers e-business at all, it’s usually to scare you with stories about computer viruses or identity theft.

Think about how the Internet has continued to grow, improve, and penetrate your daily life in the years since the dot-bomb crash. Hasn’t it made shopping more efficient, keeping in touch with friends easier through e-mail and instant messaging, and probably improved the productivity of the business where you work, too?

The result of this disconnect between popular perception of the Internet and its daily reality is that today few people realize that e-business now offers greater potential rewards with lower risks than any type of business at any time in history. Additionally, because the Internet directly reaches a larger audience of consumers than any medium in history, any e-business has the chance to generate enormous profits if it can convert just a small fraction of the online audience into customers.

Internet Riches is the first “how to” book to introduce you to e-business in an easy-to-understand way, complete with dozens of specific examples and interviews with “regular people” who have accomplished their dreams by building online businesses.

”How Can I Make Money from the Internet?”

There are millions of people like you asking this question today. They want more out of their careers and are intrigued by the self-employment opportunities offered by the Internet, but they don’t know where to go for answers.

I wrote this book to help you answer that question. In it, I share with you the specific strategies that I’ve developed in order to help you improve your life and career. You’ll see that the detailed, practical, current advice in this book—from me and dozens of top Web entrepreneurs—offers proven secrets of Internet success that can help you “reboot” your life and career. As a result, once you have read Internet Riches, you will be one of the few who has a personal action plan for Internet millionaire success.

I also promise that this book can help you find and start your own e-business, even if you don’t know much about technology.

Yes, that’s right, no technology expertise required. One of the principal reasons I wrote this book was to help the nontechnical audience (maybe that’s you?) understand that the Internet has advanced to the point where it is more user-friendly than ever. With all the new web-based tools and services available today, even a nontechnical user can set up a worldwide Internet e-business for less than $25! In this book, I’ll show you how.

Who Is Scott Fox?

I’m a highly successful e-business veteran and director of The Liminal Institute (www.LiminalInstitute.org), a California-based think tank dedicated to promotion of entrepreneurship. Based on my own success in e-business, I founded this organization because I believe that the secrets of prosperity offered by the new generation of Internet businesses deserve to be shared.

As a graduate student at Stanford University in the early 1990s, I was introduced to the Internet earlier than most people. In the subsequent decade, I’ve consistently been “ahead of the curve” and have gained a deep understanding of the great opportunities that the post-industrial economy is offering to today’s generation of workers. With this book, I’m inviting you to share in my vision should you choose to open and operate an e-business.

E-business today offers average folks everywhere the biggest profit and personal growth opportunities of our lifetimes. I know this is true because of the many successful e-businesses I have helped build, from my wife’s SweaterBabe.com venture to the e-retailing phenomenon loved by young brides nationwide (www.WeddingChannel.com) to the multimillion-dollar online businesses of celebrities like Bill O’Reilly (www. BillOReilly.com).

My expertise has previously only been available to top celebrities and venture capital-backed startups, but now I’m making the success I’ve enjoyed available to you through this book. Although it took me more than ten years to develop my techniques for e-business success, by reading this book you’ll soon see that today, you can start a new online business and begin changing your life in just hours!

Release Your “Inner Entrepreneur”

I was born an entrepreneur but didn’t realize it until well into my career. Our society, our education system, and my friends and family all consistently pushed me toward “steady jobs” rather than encouraging my dreams of personal and financial freedom. Yet when I landed prestigious and lucrative corporate jobs, I couldn’t understand why I was unhappy.

Perhaps like you, I eventually realized that I had been fighting my “inner entrepreneur” for years. Again probably like you, it was fear that had been preventing me from pursuing the entrepreneurship that is in my blood. I had been taught my whole life that starting a business was a risky, dangerous financial decision that should best be avoided in favor of “safe” corporate employment.

Then, in 1991, I decided to change my life and pursue my own dreams, not those of big corporations. Today, I refer to myself as a “graduate of corporate America” instead of its employee. If you chose to buy this book, you’re probably ready to release your inner entrepreneur, too. This book is dedicated to helping brave entrepreneurs like you to learn how to use my Internet Millionaire Secrets to build your own million-dollar business with minimal risk.

The E-Business Trend Is Your Friend

Since 1994 I have worked with dozens of startup e-commerce companies that have gone on to generate many millions of dollars in sales in a variety of industries. Every year I have found that it has gotten easier and cheaper to start an e-business: Online audiences have gotten larger and more familiar with online shopping. Online advertising and sales revenues have increased. Website-building tools have become cheaper and easier to use. Technical and content expertise has become more widely available and cheaper. And the software that runs websites has gotten more reliable, faster, cheaper, and more powerful, too.

In 1996, a company would have raised millions of dollars in venture capital to get started; today, that that same company can often bootstrap its way to success with minimal investment from its founders, especially if they follow the guidance in this book.

For example, in 1996 I founded my first company, which was a pioneer in e-commerce that targeted young music consumers. I started with six figures of my own money, added to that funding from supportive friends and family, and even received strategic investment from Intel Corporation and venture capital from a Seattle-based venture firm.

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Customer Reviews

Good Book!!
Title a little deceiving but the book is packed with information and should be read by anyone planning to start an internet business.

Not As Bad As I Feared
Absolute beginners who know nothing about the Internet and/or business will probably find this book useful, though not necessarily more useful than many free online resources. Fox clearly doesn't know much about the technical aspects of the Internet, but nothing he says is so terribly wrong that it will make a difference. Likewise, the general business information is cursory, and adds nothing to free information available online from the SBA and other groups, but it's accurate as far as it goes.

Fox makes a few points that are quite sound: you don't have to know a lot about technology or business to get started selling stuff online; it's better to get started quickly and learn as you go than to develop a perfect business plan that never gets executed; and overspending at the beginning is a bigger danger than being undercapitalized.

It doesn't take an entire book to reveal these "secrets"; nor is Fox a particularly compelling writer. But not being horribly wrong is actually better than average for a "get rich on the Internet" book. I also appreciated that he didn't advocate spamming or deceptive SEO practices, though he could have done his readers (and, thereby, the rest of the world) a service by covering these issues in more detail. His discussion of copyright could also be both improved and expanded.

While I don't necessarily recommend this book, I don't know of a better one to recommend for an absolute beginner who thinks they might want to get rich online. For general background on starting a small business, I would recommend the classic Small Time Business Operator, 10th Edition: How to Start Your Own Business, Keep Your Books, Pay Your Taxes & Stay Out of Trouble (Small Time Operator).

At last I have found what I needed
At last I found what I needed to learn. Clear structure of all the actions you have to undertake to get started and build your own e-business.