Pssst. Want the secrets to making money on the Web?
Karen Lake, the host of the nationally syndicated radio show InternetCLAN, is getting successful CEOs to spill the beans.
Each week, Lake interviews a different Internet CEO and gets them to share his or her e-business secrets. Lake posts the interviews on her site, adding them to a growing archive.
Secret No. 1 is far from the breathless, exclamation-point posts that infest the Internet. "If you are not ready to sacrifice everything to make it happen, do something else," she said.
Lake has become an expert on e-business by interviewing the e-business experts -- so far, more than 50 of them.
"Everything I do comes from advice that I have received from my guests. For example, most of our partnership philosophy came from an interview with Patrick Spain, the CEO of Hoovers.com," she said.
"Much of our business plan was rewritten after our interview with the CEO of Ancestry.com, Curt Allen. We know the strategy is usable because we use it in our own business every day."
InternetCLAN partners include Amazon, The Wall Street Journal, eMarketer, Industry Scoop, Intraware, isyndicate, Robocast, InnovaTV, IMC, and Internet Wire.
All interviews are broadcast on the site with text transcripts, and each interview is summarized in a strategy column. Guests describe how they built their businesses, warts and all. Topics cover the range of Internet business, from germinating that first idea, developing funding, creating promotions, and conceiving products.
"We have only one focus," Lake said. "We want to provide the very best Internet strategies through the eyes of CEOs who are successful online."
While Lake won't release stats, she does say InternetCLAN has doubled its subscribers in the last month.
And she can count many of the successful CEOs among her growing number of fans. In a post-show note, Lyris Technologies CEO John Buckman wrote, "You ... [have] come up with this great idea of interviewing all the movers and shakers of the Internet scene. You are providing an incredible document of this rapid transition time, which I think will accrue in value."
Added Technauts CEO Larry Deaton, "Karen is evangelistic in her zeal to enable businesses to understand and exploit the Internet. She [is] ... subtly gathering the secrets to success for Internet-enabled companies."
Lake's focus is the nontechnical small business community "searching for the best way to make their online business models successful. We have a lot of visitors from medium to large businesses, but when we write, create, record, and publish, we are thinking, 'What does the small business professional need and want to know about Internet strategy?'"
InternetCLAN's strategy is to build user trust by offering compelling, smart content before selling its business-building products and services beginning in the first quarter of 2000.
"We feel if we are known for compelling useful content, people will automatically buy our services because they have built that trust in our content," she said.
