A specialty condiment company that hocked homemade jams and mustards at street fairs in Texas grew fantastically. They were awfully generous with samples, spread on good crackers and fresh bread. Didn't loads of people take advantage of free food? Sure, but soon they were a mainstay at bazaars and big events, always with their spread of mustards and jams. People tasted product, loved handsome jar labels, and bought them up. How much could it have cost them to open up10 or 15 jars during an event?

A classic selling dilemma is need to help customers over decision-making hump. Are they sure your product is worth their hard-earned money? This is your chance to eliminate risk. It's "free trial-offer" solution.

Among other things, Mark was instrumental in sparking e-book marketing craze, wrote an e-book which has been downloaded millions of times, and is responsible for one of greatest success stories in Net history: building of SearchHound.com on an ad budget of $0 - and selling it for millions.

[Marty]: Mark, can you give us a little background on your online business operations?

[Mark]: Well, I started on Net back when I was a very young man and Internet was then called "Arpanet." My uncle had an Arpanet teletype machine in his house and from that point on I was hooked.

In 1994, when e-commerce was just starting to happen on Net, I opened my first business and acted as a software reseller. Now I own my own Internet software company - Aesop dot com.

Our latest project is called ROIbot. With this, we started out by asking "what does everyone doing business online really need to be successful?" and we built tools that answered that question.

[Marty]: What are some keys to Internet success that you've discovered?

[Mark]: Two things: Testing and persistence.

There is so much advice out there... Some of it's very good, some of it's horrible. To make matters worse - some of it may be good advice for someone else, but bad advice for you.

So what do you do? You can test!

When you test, you know exactly what's working. And when you know what's working, you can duplicate that success again and again.

Try some simple math. Imagine you have a website that is generating one sale of your product for every 300 visitors. You net $50 per sale.

If you get 3,000 visitors per month, you're making $500 per month in net profit.

Then you test out 5 new websites and find one that gets you one sale for every 50 visitors.

For same traffic level, 3,000 visitors per month, you are now earning $3,000 per month, rather than $500.

Here is where persistence comes in. You have to be willing to try out different things and accept that most of what you try will fail. If you keep trying, sooner or later you'll hit on some winners.

Many make mistake of trying out one thing and then giving up when it doesn't work. You should just assume that your first round out of your gun is going to be a dud. Accept it and keep firing!

One problem with Net is this - what may be working one day could soon become obsolete! The only thing that stays consistent is testing.

[Marty]: What specific types of online tools are you using successfully?