John Dilbeck Musings

The big lie about the Internet is that it’s easy to make money. Just put up a website and everyone will come and buy what you offer and you can retire rich with no effort.

It’s just not that easy. Anyone can put up a website in a few hours or days, but most of those sites die a slow death because of a lack of visitors and buyers.

However, it doesn’t have to be that way. The key to a successful website is good quality content. People on the Internet are not searching for you, they’re searching for information to help them solve a problem or accomplish a goal.

By providing that information in a format that is easily indexed by the search engines, those same search engines will send hundreds or thousands of visitors every month to your site for free. You don’t have to keep advertising once you learn how to build a site that provides what people are searching for.

I learned about Ken Evoy when I first bought his ebook, Make Your Site Sell!. That was the best $17 I ever spent. He updated the book in 2002 to over 1500 pages of quality information and raised the price to $30. Now, the 2005 edition is very close to release and will be available at the link earlier in this paragraph.

Over the next four years, he and his team have built the best web design, website hosting, and website promotion service on the planet, and they sell this service for only about one dollar per day. I’m using Site Build It! to build A Year From Now and I’m seeing a steady increase in visitors every month, even though I won’t go into full development on that site for another month.

I love the products that Ken sells, and I’ve arranged to give away — free — several of his ebooks, all of which are in Acrobat PDF format. You can download any of the courses listed below at no charge.

The Affiliate Masters Course is what helped me finally start earning affiliate commissions. Now, I earn 100% of my income from affiliate marketing.

The Net Auctions course sold for $30 just last year, and now it is offered free.

If you sell a service, the Service Sellers Masters Course will help you learn to effectively marketing your service online.

Veriuni has reformulated their Advanced Liquid Nutrition product and it is now available in both the United States and Canada.

Previously, it was not exportable to Canada because it contained Vitamin K, which is restricted there.

With the recent reformulation, the Vitamin K was removed.

Hendersonville-based SCORE Western North Carolina announced that Judy Grove has joined its new branch office in Murphy, North Carolina, as a volunteer business counselor.

SCORE is a not-for-profit all volunteer resource partner with the U.S. Small Business Administration. They offer free business advice, counseling and mentoring to entrepreneurs who want to start, expand, finance or buy a business.

Grove, a seasoned entrepreneur, is president and chief executive officer of Grove Enterprises, Inc. in Brasstown. She has many years of experience overcoming the challenges of starting and making small businesses profitable and will apply these skills when helping her SCORE clients.

Dick Adams is the chair of SCORE Western North Carolina and met with Grove in Murphy. He told her that Washington-based SCORE was started 40 years ago and has since grown to 10,500 volunteers, in 385 chapters nationwide. Adams said that new Cherokee County branch is an outreach of the Hendersonville-based, SCORE Western North Carolina with 27 volunteers and branches in Brevard and Rutherford. It will serve small businesspersons in Cherokee, Clay and Graham counties.

To learn more online, check out, www.scorewnc.org and www.score.org. Grove’s Web site is, www.grove-ent.com.

Domiciled at the Small Business Center of Tri-County Community College in Cherokee County, NC, the new SCORE office conducts private and confidential counseling and mentoring sessions with business owners.

SCORE’s local branch office is looking for a few more volunteers. This interesting opportunity is available to working and retired men and women who have small business or corporate skills. They must enjoy helping others succeed spend a few hours monthly on a flexible schedule. Resources and training are provided.

For further information on volunteering or to request an application, please e-mail: JKChautin@aol.com or call (828) 837-4598 in Murphy or (828) 693-8702 in Hendersonville.

I’ve been working for a couple of weeks to create a new portal, CherokeeCountyNC.com, for Cherokee County, NC that will provide information to its visitors about the people, organizations, businesses, schools, and events in Cherokee County.

This portal will become much more valuable if you participate and help provide information about what you are doing. Get your own LoCalendar.com free calendar and publish your meetings and events as public items in your zip code. Submit press releases, news, and articles and we’ll do our best to publish those that are suitable for the site.

Over time, the goal is to make CherokeeCountyNC.com your first destination whenever you go online. You can help make the site that useful.