April 2002

Case Study
Dan Janal

Dan Janal is an interesting case because he was already an established Internet Marketing expert to business before he started doing it for himself. Dan is the author of "Dan Janal's Guide to Marketing on the Internet," a speaker who has talked about Internet marketing all around the globe and he taught classes at Berkeley on Internet marketing. Dan says about himself, "The things I was doing prior to starting my own information publishing business were baby steps compared to what I'm doing now."

Looking at it the opposite way, I'd say Dan has taken Giant Leaps in his marketing efforts and knowledge of the down and dirty I-don't-have-a-big-corporation-behind-me kind of marketing. Dan is now creating and maintaining his own websites, has an e-newsletter, does telephone seminars, and runs an awesome info publishing business right from his home office. 

I asked Dan how being in his own Internet business has changed his life. He said, "I actually work longer than I did before, I make alot more money, but I don't have to travel which is a nightmare these days." He also said that he is not pursuing speaking engagements anymore although he doesn't turn down requests either. 

So what's he doing?
Dan came up with a unique fee-based service to provide customized targeted publicity leads to business people. He created a website to promote the service http://www.prleads.com , a free newsletter to teach people how best to use the leads and a shopping system to sell products and to virtually automate much of the process. 

He told me, "I am making extremely good use of autoresponders and sequential autoresponders provided by my shopping system (he's using a version of http://www.kickstartcart.com ). I use them for automated customer follow up, signups and reminders for my telephone seminars, and lots of administrative details that I formerly had to do by hand. My shopping system is one of the best bargains I've ever gotten. It used to cost me $50.00 per month each to get programs to do just one of the many functions I use it for.  Now it costs me $50.00 per month total and it's all integrated. Right now I'm working into getting the upsell module going to increase the individual sale when people buy products and seminars."

I asked Dan what were some of the main problems he's had in creating this new business. He said laughingly, "TYPOS." Dan has actually hired a copy editor/proofreader to catch the things that spellcheckers won't. He also said that about the hardest thing to do is to learn the software. Most software programs are so feature rich you really have to calm down and implement one feature at a time and get comfortable with it. Then you can move on and learn another feature. Dan' advice on this,

"Don't bite off too much at once, but definitely keep on learning your software which will save you tons of time, money and effort in the future."

Dan sounded really excited about his new business. I'm excited too because I was among some of his first clients and as I mentioned in the traffic generation article in this issue. The first day after I used his service I was being interviewed by the Wall Street Journal . . .now that's Great Internet Marketing 

Upcoming case studies