By Paul Lang, Editor, Sell It!
September 29th, 1999

See Also   Terrence Sherry and 1 World Sarongs   Andrew Bridgeman and eART-originals   Mark Annett and Scruplestore.com   David Sabot and Cheaphumidors.com   William Waite and Nemmelgeb Murr   Mary Lu Wason and LampLink   Michael Campbell and Cellwest   Bob Rankin and Flowers Fast   Louis Jay and Health4Her.com   Jeff Swearingen and TheGift.com   Bill Broadbent the T-Shirt King   Jim Goodbody and PlanetLearn   Todd Mogren and coastaltool.com   John D. Einhorn and CapShack.com   Beverley Wood and the Gift Ship   Sgt. David Hack and US Wings   Brenda Do and MindFood Media.com   Rory O'Connor and Shopirish.com

If there's one thing that there's no shortage of on the 'Net then it's Internet marketing advice. And I'm sure, like me, you have signed up for many newsletters and purchased books and courses written by several self-proclaimed marketing gurus. But have you ever stopped to question the qualifications and experience of the people dispensing this advice?

Now whilst many authors provide advice based on real 'Net marketing experience, I get the distinct feeling that a fair proportion are marketing theorists. The old adage "Those that can, do it. Those who can't, teach it" springs to mind.

Michael Campbell on the other hand, is definitely somebody who has "put his money where his mouth is". To demonstrate his marketing skills he teamed up with a friend to help promote a cell phone accessory Web store, Cellwest. And using mainly free, online marketing techniques, Michael helped the store to generate over $750,000 in sales during its first year.

How did he do it? Read my interview with him and find out...

Lang: How did you first get involved with Cellwest.com?

Campbell: When I first met the owner of Cellwest, he was working out of his parent's basement selling cellular accessories through the local Penny Traders, the Buy and Sell type weekly papers.

Now he has a two story downtown warehouse and eight employees. I used the internet and an online store to generate over $750,000 in sales the first year, using the internet as the sole marketing medium.

It was a meeting by chance actually. I got involved with Cellwest through a local area graphic designer that I had used on several web projects. It turns out that a friend of his was putting together a web site for Cellwest. So it was a friend of a friend type of a thing.

I did a little research to see if cellular phone accessories would be a worth promoting. Turns out that something like 1 in 4 Americans owns a cell phone, so there was definitely a market there. I'm smart enough to know that the money you make will be in direct proportion to the problem you solve. I set out to find out how much of a problem "cellular accessories" was.

Turns out that most of the cellular retail stores are small and can only stock the latest or hottest items. People who bought their cell phone six months to a year ago were out of luck. There was no where to get a replacement battery or new leather case. Turns out there was a huge demand for a cellular accessories warehouse that specialized in old, obsolete, rare and hard to find items. I was definitely interested!

Lang: What level of experience/knowledge of the Internet and e-commerce did you have before this?

Campbell: I had a lot of internet marketing and web site design knowledge before Cellwest but little in the way of ecommerce. I was designing web sites and consulting in prepress but it was the internet marketing that I was really interested in. I would guarantee top 10 positioning in 4 out the 8 major search engines or you don't pay. Pretty scary huh?

Cellwest decided to take me up on the offer and I did a single hook page (doorway page) for them. Two weeks later the phones were ringing like crazy and he couldn't keep up with the orders. He got me to make a second hook page and experienced the same results. His sales were directly linked to the pages I had created for him. Needless to say Cellwest recognized a real opportunity. Great, now we were both very interested.

Lang: What were your goals when you teamed up with Cellwest? Have you achieved them?

Campbell: I have achieved everything I set out to do with Cellwest. They made $750,000 in internet revenue their first year of operation. I proved to myself that if you followed "my way" of internet marketing, you could sell gobs of "dirt world product" over the internet, without paying for advertising.

I wanted to see how far I could take a virtual store with no conventional advertising of any kind. I made rules for myself, no tv ads, no radio, no printed catalogs, not even a business card would be allowed. By the time my one year contract was over, I wanted Cellwest.com to be profitable, growing and totally self sustaining.

It was like a challenge that would fly in the face of conventional marketing wisdom. I wanted to leave the "so called experts" scratching their heads saying "Hey, how did he do that?" Let's just say it was a bit of a personal vendetta.

A few years ago, when I helped put together internet marketing courses for a local university, the professors and big business owners kept shoving the internet into a tiny little corner of an overall marketing plan. Usually with the lowest of priorities with budgets less than they would spend on business cards or transit shelters.

Of course I'm thinking... hello? You guys have ad agencies, copy writers, graphic designers, prepress, and print shops all involved in your print advertising, why should the web site (which millions of people will see) receive any less budget, attention or level of professionalism? Alas, sigh, they didn't listen, and I had something to prove. And prove it I did.

If you FOCUS your business on the internet, its reach is phenomenal. You can compete on a global scale. It completely levels the playing field of retail sales. Two people can come along and completely blind side what would have been "dirt world" competition by being quick to react, establish themselves online and brand themselves as being FIRST in a whole new product category.

In my dealings with everything from the smallest to the largest of companies, I have to conclude that entrepreneurial spirit has the clear advantage when its comes to the internet. Two people with passion about an idea, clear goals and a little determination can achieve their dreams and earns bags of cash, using nothing more than the internet. You don't even need to exist or have a physical location in the "dirt world". You don't even need a business card. Sorry Mr. Marketing Professor, you were wrong.

Lang: What server and shopping cart software are you using and why?

Campbell: We tried a couple of different hosting solutions before we finally settled on a friend of mine who had decent prices and a really good statistics package included in the hosting. I also recommend finding a host that can do additional databases, programming or scripting, rather than farming it out to a third party. That way, there's more quality control and less communication issues.

We chose not to use a shopping cart. In the beginning, most of the shoppers were men. Actually I shouldn't even call them shoppers, as most were just looking for information.

The men I surveyed don't like shopping and they don't like carts. It brings up images of squeaky wheels and line ups. The men I talked to like go in, get what they want, and get out.

They also want to phone up and talk to a human to place the order. They want to be sure any technical issues are resolved before they actually place an order. So even though Cellwest provided a secure online order form, the toll free number outperformed it by a 20 to 1 ratio.

Plus most of the shopping cart software is database driven and makes a web site square and boxy looking. Most of the packages I looked at severely limited the creativity in site design.

I also know that with most shopping carts, you have to put all your product into a database. By choosing not to use a database, Cellwest's multiple static web pages are rich in keywords and perform well in the search engines, clobbering the database driven competition.

Thankfully some trends are changing. About 40% of the shoppers are women. They are buying because all the confidence building factors are in plain view on the site, and they like the way Cellwest is laid out just like a printed catalog. Everything is exactly where you would expect to find it.

Michael Campbell is the author of "Nothing But 'Net". How I generated $750,000 in internet revenues with virtually no advertising costs.

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