The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business Without Quitting Your Day Job (19 page)

refunds, and abide by many other rules. It’s a lengthy contract, but you better read it

because these people are serious about your fol owing the rules. It’s just part of doing

business as a ful -fledged merchant that can accept credit cards.

In exchange for al of those requirements you meet, the credit card companies and

merchant account provider agree to process your customers’ cards promptly, send you

notices for each sale, and help to resolve disputes when some customers may claim that

they never ordered your product.

Step Four: Get a Payment Gateway. You may have heard of merchant accounts before

but chances are good that you’ve never heard of payment gateways, yet they’re critical

to your ability to take credit cards directly.

A payment gateway is al the computer connections between you, your bank account,

and the credit card companies, just as the merchant account is al the agreements

between those parties.

When your customers hit the Buy Now button on your web site, the payment gateway

swings into action and first validates the credit card number and expiration date.

Then the gateway validates the customer’s address. This is an important step to

prevent credit card fraud. Let’s say Mary Jones lives at 123 Main Street in Chicago, but

now someone claiming to be Mary Jones is trying to buy your product and the buyer

enters on your web site a bil ing address of 456 South Avenue instead of 123 Main

Street. If that credit card was stolen the thief may not know the correct bil ing address.

The payment gateway performs this address verification check and gets either a green

light and continues to process the transaction or a red light, in which case you—the

merchant—wil receive an e-mail that the transaction was attempted but it failed due to

an address mismatch.

Assuming the address is fine the payment gateway then checks for sufficient funds in

the customer’s bank account. If the customer doesn’t have sufficient funds then the

transaction won’t go through and al parties get notified of that. If the customer has

sufficient funds then al parties get notified and the funds are transferred from the

customer’s account to yours. Al of this happens in a fraction of a second.

As we discussed, some customers wil not want to enter their credit card numbers on

the Web but wil prefer to give you the card details over the phone. In that case you’l be

able to log into your payment gateway and enter the card details for the customers. You’l

get instant notification if the transaction was successful or not.

Step Five: Get a Shopping Cart. Now that you have al the behind-the-scenes accounts

and tools set up, they come together in the form of a shopping cart on your web site.

The shopping cart software al ows customers to specify first the quantity of products

they want to buy and then to put one or more products into their online virtual cart. When

customers are ready to check out, they’re taken to a special secure, encrypted page

where they enter their credit card details. Typical y, your web browser wil show a little

padlock somewhere on the screen to indicate that the web page you’re on is secure.

Some merchants are lazy and don’t bother with the secure-page part. That is not only

a good way to get in hot water with the credit card companies, but many customers look

for the little padlock icon on the screen and wil not enter their credit card details without

it. That results in lost sales because many of those customers wil not bother to pick up

the phone and cal the merchant with their card details. You should regularly check your

web site to make sure it’s showing the padlock icon and everything is running smoothly

—no Page Not Found errors and so on.

The cart also calculates state sales tax and enables customers to specify the type of

shipping they’d like. When customers hit the PAY NOW button the shopping cart

interfaces with the payment gateway to perform al the checks and authorizations.

Customers wil next see a screen that either tel s them the transaction was successful

or it indicates the nature of any problem. In the case of downloadable products the cart

wil al ow the customer to download the product from a special page after paying for it.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of having a good shopping cart. Everything

you’ve done up to this point as an info marketer has been to get the customers to take

out their credit cards and enter them on your site. This is not the time to blow the

transaction with confusing instructions, hard-to-read text, unclear policies, or software

that hiccups and does not smoothly handle the transactions.

You know what I’m talking about because you as a consumer have been the victim of

these types of poor shopping carts before. A good cart is constructed so the checkout

and payment procedures are smooth and confidence-building for the customers.

Another excel ent aspect of the better shopping carts is they al ow you to offer an

additional product or service to customers who just that moment finished buying your first

product. This is known as an upsel . The most famous example of an upsel is when you

order a burger at McDonald’s and the person asks: “Would you like fries with that?”

You’re free to say “no thanks,” but McDonald’s knows from countless mil ions of

customers that a certain number of people wil think, “
Hey
sure, why
not?
” and order the

fries on impulse.

Of course, some companies carry this process to an extreme and pester customers

with too many upsel attempts, one after another. If you do it right, though, you’re offering

a complementary service to customers at the very moment they have their credit cards

out and are in a buying mood. It’s an extremely effective method of marketing.

Good shopping cart software also al ows you to run al sorts of reports on your

customers—who bought what, when did the buy, which products are most popular, what

patterns exist for popularity of product by region of the country, and so on.

If you would like my current recommendations for merchant accounts, payment

gateways, and shopping carts just go to www.sixfiguresecondincome.com and type the

words “direct cards” into the search box.

Al this stuff is a decent amount of work but I have good news for you—once it’s set up

you real y don’t have to deal with it again. You may change the shipping preferences you

want to offer your clients or make other smal adjustments, but once set up the system

wil pretty much run on autopilot.

Building Block Seven: Set Up an Effective E-Mail System

“Oh, I have e-mail already so I can skip this section.” That would be a big mistake,

because having e-mail as a private citizen and having e-mail as an information marketer

are two very different beasts. In a later chapter I wil discuss the content you need to have

in your e-mails in order to make the most money, but right now let’s talk about the system

you must put into place.

Home E-Mail Accounts

The chances are good that you have had a Hotmail, AOL, Comcast, or similar e-mail

account at some point. When you sign up for home Internet service your vendor—also

known as an Internet Service Provider or ISP for short—wil give you home e-mail

accounts.

And they do mean home account, because they get very cranky when you start to send

lots of commercial e-mail from your home account. How do they know it’s commercial e-

mail? They can detect commercial e-mail in two ways.

First, the ISPs scan your outgoing e-mails for certain words that tel them you are

sending commercial e-mail. It’s not a certainty but a statistical probability that if your e-

mail uses combinations of stop words like free, buy, product, guarantee, cost, payment,

discount, and hundreds of other words, you’re probably not talking to Grandma but to a

potential customer.

Note: Don’t just try to avoid the few words I mention above because the list contains

hundreds of words, and it varies from ISP to ISP. The bottom line is they know when

you’re sending a nonpersonal e-mail.

Second, the ISPs monitor if you send a single e-mail to one person or that same e-

mail to many dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people al at once. Their systems light

up like a Christmas tree if you not only have those stop words in your e-mail, but you’re

also sending the exact same text to even just a dozen people in short order.

The least-bad thing that wil happen to you if you send that sort of e-mail is it wil reach

your ISP’s red-flag system but they wil not al ow it to leave their servers and be sent to

the recipient addresses. They may or may not even tel you that they refused to send the

mail, by the way.

The next bad thing that can happen is your ISP wil not al ow you to send e-mails at al ,

or they may boot you off the e-mail system entirely.

It gets worse. Even if you somehow manage to get the e-mails through, you’l

encounter another whole set of e-mail filters on the other end—the recipient end.

Therefore, if Comcast, for instance, notices that suddenly hundreds of its customers are

receiving the exact same e-mail with al those same stop words in each e-mail, they

might either delay or reject those e-mails from al of the Comcast e-mail accounts. If

they’re feeling particularly frisky they wil ban any of your future e-mails from ever

reaching any Comcast accounts! They won’t even bother to tel you but suddenly none of

your Comcast customers has heard a peep from you, nor wil they ever again.

I use Comcast as an example but most of the other big ISPs like AOL, Hotmail, and

Gmail work the same way.

“But Uncle Louie’s kid Melvin told me he can hook me up with software

that’s specifical y designed for businesses. It only costs a one-time fee and

Question:
it wil completely automate the process of sending and receiving business

e-mail. Why do I need to go to some separate company to handle my e-

mail?”

Would you quit listening to Uncle Louie and his kid Melvin already? The

reason they’re not rich is they either shoot down other people’s ambitions or

they look for cheapo shortcuts to doing the job right. The type of software

they’re talking about does sit on your desktop and does manage al the

Answer:
outgoing and incoming e-mail—but it does so by using your same home e-

mail account. Therefore, al that software wil do is automate and quicken the

pain you’l feel when the sending ISP or the receiving ISPs cut you off at the

knees.

Commercial E-Mail Accounts

What’s the solution to this mess? It’s to get a commercial e-mail account. A whole

industry has sprung up in recent years whose only purpose is to handle the delivery of

commercial e-mail from companies to their intended recipients.

The purpose of a commercial e-mail account is to get legitimate business e-mail to its

intended recipients and filter out everything else. Your commercial account wil test your

e-mail message for you and give you a score of how spammy it is, and therefore its

likelihood of being red-flagged.

You wil simply not believe the sophisticated systems in use today to detect spam e-

mail. It’s become a real cat-and-mouse game. Years ago the systems created those

stop words like free, guarantee, and so on. Then spammers started to get cute and send

messages with words like fr.ee because spammers know that humans can read
fr
.
ee
as

free but machines may think it’s a new, innocent word.

That was effective for a few months of sending spam until the filters got more

sophisticated so now they’re on to that little ploy about mis-spel ing words on purpose. I

highly recommend that you not play games like that, not only because they’l most likely

not work, but because they also make you look like a spammer.