Mirabilis. (Means "wonderful, notable, or remarkable")

Mirabilis was purchased in 1998 by AOL for around 300 million bucks. Mirabilis was a small business with only one software program, but it was worth millions to America On Line.

So what was Mirabilis' software?

ICQ.

ICQ (I Seek You) software, as you probably know, enables anyone on Internet to engage in chats or to personally contact anyone else who is online at moment and a user of this software.

The most interesting part of story is that Mirabilis doesn't sell ICQ software. They give it away! For free! It is available to anyone who wants it. All you have to do is go to their site or a multitude of other sites and download it.

As a matter of fact, Download.com reported that for week of January 27, 2002, 1,044,176 people download ICQ. And that's just from their site!

That means that by providing ICQ software for free, Mirabilis receives over 1 MILLION new contacts for their company through Download.com alone.

What if your Internet business could get just one tenth or one hundredth of those results? What if you could receive just 10,442 new contacts weekly without having to spend a penny in advertising? Would that help your bottom line? (Duh!)

Mirabilis is an Internet success story if there ever was one. They can also be an example of success to us in our own online businesses.

Although there are lots of web marketing techniques (ezine advertising, banner ads, Goto.com, et al), most cost- effective marketing is free advertising.

The absolute best thing that you can promote online is software. It is easiest thing for any small business to get involved with and possibly achieve proverbial "overnight success".

Think about it for moment. What does absolutely every computer user need? They need software! What has made Bill Gates richest man on planet? Software! If you own a computer, you buy software!

However, writing software may not be your cup of tea. Perhaps staring at thousands of lines of programming code for hours on end doesn't appeal to you. No worries. You are in good company. It doesn't really appeal to a lot of other people (including me) either.

Remember: Mothers Day and Fathers Day are coming up. Prepare for them. Create a sense of excitement around your site. Make some extra cash.

When you do what we're going to talk about today, first you'll have a lot of fun doing it. Then, you'll begin a process of making some extra cash both now and over time.

Let’s being. On your website, leave top-most column under Header blank.

You can reserve this space to highlight anything new on your site as a benefits-driven, attention-grabbing Header. Or, use it as a helpful reminder to your visitor of upcoming events.

Ideally, you would have this advert spot as text format. Text always opens to your guest before graphic downloads. So, if you can grab your visitor's attention quickly, better chances of keeping them around while your site downloads.

(And, remember to insert your "alt text" in banner itself as many surfers disable their graphics capture. Doing this and doing it right is also important for making your site more search engine relevant.)

Now, Mother's Day is coming up. (There are also a number of religious holidays coming up even sooner). But, stick with Mother’s Day theme for this example.

What goes well with Mother's Day? Jewelry, Cosmetics, Flowers, e-Cards, gourmet Chocolates and Treats, fine Wines... maybe a bit of Travel, And, where there's Travel, there's luggage. We are sure you can think of a few more things... maybe even a good dating service if mom or dad is single and lonely. Get idea?

Remember to keep choices simple and limited for your visitor. With too many choices, say, more than four or five, they could get confused as to what to do and end up doing nothing.

About three weeks before Mother's Day, your site should have, in that empty space just below header, " Your Mother's Day! > Your Site Name here < Mother's Day Gift Shoppe... just in case you forgot". Ours might say “ProShop Mother’s Day Gift Shoppe” with a hyperlink to a page built long ago with folders of site.

Does this generate a bunch of cash from Gift Shoppe? Well, depending upon your traffic, it should pay for itself. Does this generate some extra volume? Yes. Does it generate some extra sales for your main site? Yep! Does it generate repeat visits from people who become repeat customers looking for other theme related topics on your site? Absolutely. And, that’s key.

Your site should have theme shoppe pages, mini-sites within its folders, for Father's Day, Christmas, Olympics, March Madness, The NCAA Final Four, The Indy Five Hundred, The Preakness, The Kentucky Derby, Graduation Day, The Great Summer Vacation, and several more.

Notice we use Old English “Shoppe”. It’s friendlier, looks more like a boutique but without price-tags implied by using word: boutique.