Louis Allport - Hi, I'm Louis Allport, and today I'm speaking with Neil Shearing of ScamFreeZone.com. Hi Neil, and thank you very much for being on the call today. Neil Shearing - Hi Louis, thanks for having me.
LA - That's okay. I know you've been marketing online for a very long time - I think it may even be more than 10 years. What we're going to focus on in this interview in particular is autopilot income.
We will look at how to create sites that generate income both quickly or over a longer period of time. But most importantly, these are sites that require very little work and very little upkeep.
So, okay first of all, if we can just briefly talk about your background and particularly your Internet business history?
NS - Okay, I first found out about the Internet in... it was about 1996 I think, so we're going back an awful lot of years. And it was in a lab, a science lab in Chicago - because I was basically a scientist up until that point.
I remember someone saying, "Oh yeah you need to get online, you need to do this stuff." And I was, "What's this Internet thing about?" So they pulled me over to the computer and they said, "Yeah it's great you can find anything. Type in your home town.
" So I did, I typed in the name of my home town and it came up with zero results, and this was probably Info seek or Alta Vista because I don't think Google was around back then.
And I've just repeated the same search online now just to put it in context and it came back with like 603,000 results for my hometown. But when I first discovered the Internet there was zero, which shows the growth of the Internet.
I remember deconstructing the GeoCities.com homepage to try and work out how their tables all fit together to make their page - I was teaching myself HTML.
So I was playing around with some free GeoCities.com pages, and then GeoCities was subsequently bought out by Yahoo in 1999.
And after putting up a few personal pages I thought I could start maybe writing a report and try to sell it online.
So I wrote a report and because I was a poor student at the time I didn't have any money to invest in the business. I basically figured it had to pay for itself, there had to be a way to do it. So I used a third party processor.
A third party processor is a company that will process credit card orders for you and take a percentage of each sale. So if you don't sell anything in a month you don't owe them fees, that way you only pay a percentage of your costs.
So I used some free web space from my Internet service provider, the only thing I was paying for was the Internet service.
And I put up a page on the free web space and I started selling this report through the third party processor and there was no instant delivery or anything.
The report was basically just a Word document. There were no fancy eBooks and I don't think anyone had invented the term 'eBook' or the term 'Internet marketing'. It all predates that. And I started selling these reports from my free web space.
