Cover Story

September 2011 Issue --> Cover Story Article

Cash In On the Daily Deal Builder Market Now!

By: Hollis Carter

Hollis Carter is one of the founders of HC Consulting Group, a software development and marketing company. Based out of Atlanta, Georgia and Breckenridge, Colorado, the company has grown over time into a global business. HC Consulting Group offers information and software products for their clients' internet business needs.

Hollis received his BBA from Kennesaw State University with a focus on professional selling. He currently specializes in affiliate relations, sales process, and high-end consulting. When Hollis is not busy meeting clients and working in the business, he enjoys skiing and traveling around the world.

TAMMY LAWMAN: Tell our readers a little bit about how you got your start in internet marketing.

HOLLIS CARTER: Basically, we were going to college. Mark and I were roommates and had been friends in high school. We ended up realizing it was close to the end of college, and we were going to have to send out resumes and join the grind of the world. We were not really looking forward to doing that.

We had gotten an email from a website called Facebook right near the end of college. At the beginning of Facebook you had to have a .edu address, so we got in there and were one of the first schools to really see that. We saw that was something that was going to be big.

One night sitting around a fire Mark and I decided that we were going to start our own Facebook kind of site, our own social networking site. What we started was a social networking site that was for K-12 schools, essentially trying to help lower-funded schools get the same advantages as the schools with better funding for better teachers and things like that. We wanted to connect all those people together in one private network.

That was great. We were almost done with college, and I was able to use my groups that I was in to help me out with the projects. We pulled together some of our money that we had saved up to hire some developers to build the site, and we made that work.

Then we found ourselves driving around in the hot Georgia heat in suits, selling schools on this idea. We realized we had kind of missed the point on what we were doing, as we found ourselves working a lot. After sitting down, rethinking it, and talking about how you can't really solve your problems in the current way that you created them, we thought, "What if we could just give this to everyone?" We'd already taken the time making the code and building all this. Why couldn't we just give that to everyone?

Right away Mark went to work with some of the funds we'd made from SchoolBridge making our platform for social networking a little easier for anyone to get in and run a social network in any niche they wanted to from pretty much anywhere. For anybody who has any passion, there are going to be people who want to share ideas and be in a smaller community than Facebook or do something more unique to them.

I went to work interviewing people who had created successes with other social networking sites, and from what we had learned from what we done and what I learned in the interviews, we created essentially a business manual for people to do this in any niche. We made a 30-minute video and put it on the internet. Within two months, we'd already sold a ridiculous number of units of this. It grew from a six-figure company in two months to a seven-figure company that year just from that one presentation, video, and idea.

It was really cool to help a lot of people. We've had people create social networking sites in niches like sewing, RVs, finances, HOAs, and swim clubs. You can pretty much name it. They use it to do it. It was cool to see people profiting from their passions and to be at the center of that.

Then we realized we had a cool little business model where we would look for profitable trends like social networking sites and try to build a system that anyone could use to do that, and since then, we've grown to capitalize using that same way for ourselves and our clients. We've done it with a video sharing platform, and now the big thing that we're very involved in is the Daily Deals Space.

We're essentially following the model that we can create these systems. We have a great development team who really understands our goals and visions. They'll do things that we see as the trends that all businesses need and, and that will allow different online entrepreneurs to capitalize on these trends using our software tools and training.

That has been the model we've been following for a while. It's been just about four years in November that we've been doing this, and it's been a great ride. It's quite the lifestyle. I was able to ski 135 days last year. Mark and I just went sailing around the British Virgin Islands. It's fun to live that lifestyle, but we work pretty hard and enjoy it. It's a fun ride.

TAMMY LAWMAN: I'm totally jealous that you get to spend that many days skiing. It's fabulous that you've been able to build a life and a business that allow you to do that. What are the biggest trends and changes you've seen in internet marketing in the last year?

HOLLIS CARTER: A lot of changes have happened with the introduction of a lot more people being online and getting the understanding of it and the transparency that's involved now. The typical ways of selling using long-form sales letters and squeeze pages still work in different niche markets because there are people who aren't quite as exposed, but the sales cycle is getting longer.

It's built a lot more around relationships as opposed to direct selling because people can be so transparent and share so much. Pretty much every single person in the internet has the ability to drive traffic in one way or shape right now and can influence everyone's buying decisions. There is a lot more traffic, and a lot of people are going to the internet for pleasure.

People who are in internet marketing really need to realize what environment they're trying to market to. If you're doing traditional email marketing, you know that people are getting tons and tons of email every day, and it's starting to get diluted. If you're doing that, you need to find a way to communicate more directly with the people. We've been doing a lot of videos in emails and things like that.

If you're doing it through social networking, which a lot of people are, you really have to flip a switch on how you're thinking about that marketing. When someone goes to Google or they're searching for something they possibly want to buy that they want more information about, when you're on a network like Facebook, those people are more like they're at a bar. They're there to get away from their other world and see what other people are doing.

The cycle there is a little bit longer, and you need to change the way you're doing it. If you're not capitalizing in marketing in the bar where real relationships are being made, then you're really missing out on a piece of the pie. I think it's essentially involving and following the trends that are happening.

For sales right now, the Daily Deals are absolutely huge. It's one of the biggest overnight industries we've ever seen. It's a multi-billion-dollar industry. You give people a great discount, and you drive a lot of that traffic through social media. You're helping merchants get large groups of businesses pretty much on demand.

I think with the new way of selling with these Daily Deals and impulse sites, which essentially give all the power to the customers, the massive amount of social networking, and the thumbprint that pretty much everyone has online, there's a lot to be had there. People need to continue to expand their thinking and realize what worked four or five years ago is definitely not going to work in today's environment.

It's kind of funny. The internet turned 20 over the weekend, and my business partner Mark and I were joking about how the internet is about to start drinking, and soon it will become an adult and start to understand what it really is and really develop as it is developing really quickly right now. Just watch the trends.

A quick tip that we use to watch those trends is just using Google Alerts for certain keywords and things you want to make sure that…

This article is just a small portion of an hour-long interview, and is only one of several interviews conducted for Internet Marketing TNT. If you'd like to see the full call, as well as other interviews in this series, simply visit Internet Marketing - Very Important Profit Systems.

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Cash In On the Daily Deal Builder Market Now! by Hollis Carter

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