Part 1: Being "dirtsmart" and good online infrastructure

How did you get your start in your business?
I've been involved in "publishing" in one form oranother for years. Since school. It's in the blood I guess. The Net's a nice and obvious evolutionary extension for the industry, so I'm here. I started publishing an ezine for netpreneurs on my own, then called e-Factory NewsDesk, and Michael Werner, CEO of Intellectua.com, liked what he saw.

He asked me to join him in building something new, and we came up with Intellectua.com which now publishes my ezine, Dirtsmart. That's what I've been doing since.

What do you enjoy most about your profession?
The freedom and flexibility. Theoretically anyway. Being seriously "in business" means living, eating, and breathing the thing. "Considerably more hours spent than in a 9-to-5 job" is a severe understatement. But I wouldn't trade it for anything else.

What separates "The Dirtsmart Netpreneur" and your website from similar ones?
Me. This medium's direct and personal. Folks aren't just visiting my website or reading my ezine; they're visiting and reading ME. My particular take, personality, and way of thinking. Some of them like it. Some don't.

This is something I keep reminding my readers about. They are what separates and differentiates their businesses from the competition.

What advice would you give someone just starting in this field?
A lot of people get into it because they smell the money. As a lot, these folks usually don't last. There's a lot of work involved (surprise!), and the driven-by-money folks almost always lose heart, wasting a whole bunch of their time and energy. Lesson? Make sure you're doing what you're doing because you really want to. Not just because you see others doing quite well with it.

The Net presents many opportunities to do and build an enterprise around something that's YOU; the chances of succeeding at anything increase tremendously when you've figured out exactly who you are and what you want to do. The details pretty much just fall into place after that.

What ways have you found to be the most effective when promoting your business?
We do them all. Each, for the most part, produces a trickle of traffic that when taken together adds up to quite a bit. But the most effective is the age-old "technique" of trying to get our name and products press and media coverage. A "personal recommendation" editorially, even better. Every mention usually produces A LOT of activity.

And what are the major challenges to successful email publishing that even experienced publishers face?
Pumping out good content's always a challenge, especially for serial pubs like ezines where obviously the objective is to produce it continuously and consistently. Difficult enough for fully-staffed magazines to do. You don't have to think too hard to imagine what the typical tiny or solo Net publishing operation faces.

And with the Net audience being quite unforgiving, they're not going to run out of alternatives any time soon, and free ones at that. It takes a considerable amount of effort to build and maintain, let alone grow, a substantial audience that will sustain a viable ezine publishing enterprise.

Which leads to probably the biggest challenge: converting all that work and activity into real dollars.

What ezines, besides your own, do you think succeed in producing good content consistently?
My only yardstick for this, of course, is whether I end up reading an ezine regularly or not. I have very little free time to even browse through many of the ezines that pop up in my inbox. These three, however, I really can't resist going through when I notice them come in.

The first is Willmaster Possibilities, by my ProLinkz partner William Bontrager. It covers real world CGI solutions for the layperson, and I almost always learn something new and very useful each issue. And obviously, reading it helps stimulate new business ideas for me.

Allan Gardyne's Associate Programs Newsletter is another must-read. His grassroots reporting and quick-read analysis of what's happening in the affiliate marketing arena are invaluable to the netpreneur.

Then there's Boogie Jack's Almost a Newsletter. Funny and very well-written, I read Booj's stuff just for the sheer pleasure of it. OK, he sometimes does manage to teach me something new too.

(Editor's note: See our past interviews with Allan Gardyne and Boogie Jack in the ibizInterviews archives, and our reviews of Willmaster Possibilities, Associate Programs Newsletter and Almost a Newsletter in the ibizNewsletters archives.)

If an ezine publisher only has a little money to spend on their business, where would you suggest they put it?
Online presence infrastructure. The basics, which really isn't a lot: solid Web hosting, a domain name, and decent software to build and maintain the thing with a minimum of fuss. Even if they manage/host their ezine lists elsewhere, paid or free. I find this investment pretty crucial for anything even halfway serious. And for no other reason than that there are more than enough people out there just like me who, with the overwhelming number of choices online for our eyeballs and brains to sift through, cope by largely filtering out and ignoring anything that won't even bother pretending to be worth our time and energy.

Sure, they can ignore this basic "wear a suit" principle if they want, but that strategy usually has a halfway decent chance of paying out enough only if they're really, really good and the only game in town. The Net's a mighty BIG town of really, really good folks.

Get the suit.

Continued...