Home Business Tips - Getting Your Priorities in Order
A lot of people think that the biggest mistakes you can make with your home business concern tactical problems such as a poor web page, poor advertising, bad sales copy, and so on. And while those things are all important, the real problem that home business owners have is that they don’t have their priorities in order. So that you understand what I’m talking about, I’m going to relay to you a true story about a friend of mine. I will leave out the names so as to protect the innocent and not so innocent. After you read this, you’ll realize what I mean about priorities.
A friend of mine wanting to start a home business. I asked him what he wanted to do. He said to me, “I don’t care, just as long as I make money.” Well, there was his first mistake…no business plan. You have to have a business plan no matter how simple your business is. Without a plan, you are absolutely going nowhere. Okay, so I got him on track there. We finally figured out what he wanted to do.
Next was the actual implementation of what he wanted to do. He immediately wanted to jump into creating a product, setting up a web page and so on. This is where I had to give him another “hold the phone” moment. He didn’t understand what the problem was. So I asked him one simple question. “Do you know who your target market is and what they want?” He looked at me like I had two heads. I explained to him that before you create ANYTHING you better make sure that your target market even cares about it. So I got him into doing niche research.
This process continued, every step of the way. At each stepping stone, I had to back him up as he was putting the cart before the horse. He wanted to do things before their time. Now, when you’re first starting out, you’re not going to know these things. That’s normal. Hopefully, this article will have gotten you to start thinking in terms of getting your priorities in order. You can’t sell something unless you know that what you want to sell has a real demand. And then, everything comes from that.
To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim
Looking for a solid 4 step plan to building your own business…FREE? Pick up my free report at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/4steps.html and get started TODAY!
How Do You Know When It’s Time to Quit?
How do you know when it’s time to quit your day job? I have met quite a few full-time internet marketers who always ask me why I fly across the country to seminars to hang out, only to go back to a 9-to-5 day job the next day. Despite averaging $10,000 per month income this year, I know it’s not time for me to quit. So how do you know when you should quit your job?
The very first thing you need to do is separate your day job and your internet income. It’s easy to say you average $10,000 per month (like I do) when a portion of that is from your day job income. Find out if you can really live without that day job income… deposit your paychecks DIRECTLY into your savings account instead of checking. Do not let yourself touch this money.
If you can keep this habit going every month for a year, it means not only did you survive for a year on your own, but you have a year of income to support you during those slow months.
Don’t forget about health insurance. The LACK of health insurance is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Not mismanagement, not the economy, but lack of health insurance. You might have complained about your day job taking $500 or $1000 out of your monthly paycheck to give you healthcare, but if you are self employed and are uninsured, you can easily run up a $10k or $20k medical bill if you get very sick, need an operation, or get hit by a car. Do not risk it, and do not risk your family, by being without health insurance.
Most of the full-time internet marketers I’ve interviewed have a secondary income stream to fall back on. Some at least have part time jobs, some still live with their parents, others are retired and still receive half-pay from work. Others support themselves by doing away with NECESSITIES… they fail to pay for health insurance, or the rent instead of owning a home.
It’s easy to chase the dream of doing less work for the same amount of money, but if you are still young and able-bodied, why not do a tiny bit MORE work by staying at your day job, and get your house paid off early? Fill up your retirement fund by age 30 or 40? You will be a lot happier if you maintain a normal life now and stick to your regular activities, so you can goof off later in life.
About the author:
Robert Plank, internet marketer, PHP programmer, and 23 year old homeowner, made an average of $10,000 per month every month in 2008. Check out his marketing ideas worth STEALING at: http://www.robertplank.com
Flipping Websites - The Online Entrepreneur’s Answer to Flipping Properties
One of the hottest internet topics today is “flipping websites.” You hear about people buying domain names, and then turning around and selling them for a profit. At first look, it appears to be an extremely complicated process and something you’d need real connections within the marketing world to get into, but it’s really not. Just look at a website (or a domain name) as being a property in the real estate market. Some of them are jewels that are just waiting to be renovated, and then sold for a large profit.
There are 2 ways to do a “flip”. You can do a “short-term flip”, or you can do a “long-term flip”. Short-term flips are generally tougher to turn large profits on, but every once in a while one can make a hefty margin when advertising the domain name to the right potential buyers. All my experiences in “flipping sites” have come by doing long-term flips. Moreover, I like to find “jewels” out there in the marketplace, and then build out high quality content on them. Then after sitting on them for a while, I sell them for a hefty profit.
My biggest success in doing so resulted in a profit of $171,200. I purchased a website for $1,800, and later sold that same website for $173,000. That wasn’t a fluke either, within that same year I purchased a domain name for $200, and flipped it within 6 months for $60,000. The trick is to find a domain that’s a true gem and that’s primed to rank well in the major search engines. Then building out the website to the point that it’s becoming a nice revenue stream, and selling it off at SitePoint or another website marketplace.
Of the entire process, the only somewhat challenging part is building out a website that quickly becomes a decent revenue stream. However, if you have the right tools, and know how to use them it is really quite simple. The average person is 100% capable of doing it, whether you believe it or not. If your dream is to work for yourself, flipping websites might just be in your future.
About the author:
Dave Hermansen was recently interviewed by The New York Times regarding their success flipping websites. Dave is making a video series called “Make A Living Flipping Websites”. This video series is intended to teach anyone how to make a living flipping websites for themselves. You can read more about this upcoming video series at http://www.hermansenbrothers.com
Make Money Online by Combining Craigslist and eBay
Today I want to tell you about a very simple and relatively quick way to make money online by combining eBay and Craigslist. You won’t get rich from it but you can certainly make some extra money to pay bills or take a vacation!
As you probably already know, Craigslist is one of the most popular websites in the world. It receives millions of visitors per day so it’s no wonder why internet marketers have swarmed to it in order to get a piece of that traffic.
Then we have eBay, which is also one of the largest and most successful websites in the world. And with the incredible amount of traffic to this site, the same can be said about internet marketers trying every which way to make money from it.
But check this out…
The simple money making method that I am about to explain could be done by anyone with internet access and a little bit of ambition, even someone who doesn’t have a clue what internet marketing is, because it really doesn’t have anything to do with what we typically call “internet marketing.” If you have ever bought something and later sold it for a higher price (or thought you could have), then you’ll definitely see where I’m going with this in a minute!
You see, Craigslist has a presence in every major city and most surrounding areas, and people often sell stuff on Craigslist to get rid of it fast, and a lot of the time they sell it for less than it’s worth. Everything from desks to computers and just about anything else, Craigslist seems to be the first place the average person goes to unload their goods. One of the main reasons is the fact that it’s free. Not only is it free, but it’s very easy to list things in a quick and efficient manner. Bottom line: there are many, many deals to be found on Craigslist!
Now, back to eBay – what’s the one place you check when you’re looking for that hard to find electronic gadget, rare piece of jewelry or something else you can’t seem find anywhere else? Ebay, of course!
See where this is going?
Here’s how it works… All you have to do is scour through Craigslist (the best deals are usually found in the electronics section), and look for things like IPods, IPhones, laptops, video game systems, and other similar items. Typically, if you come across one of these items, the person selling it is just trying to get rid of it fast and make some money back on it. They will almost always take a lower price than what they’re advertising, which is usually pretty low already. As soon as you see a good price on something listed on Craigslist, it’s time to head over to eBay.
Once you’re on eBay, click on “advanced search”, and once you’re in the advanced search section, check the box that says “completed auctions”. Then type in the product that you found on Craigslist for a good price, and see if they’ve been selling on eBay, and for how much on average. If the price is consistently higher on eBay for that item, and it looks like plenty of them have been sold, then you have a potential money maker!
For instance, let’s say you found a new laptop on Craigslist, and you’ve negotiated the price down to $300 cash. You then head over to eBay and find the same type of laptop is selling like crazy for $425 each on average. Right there you have a chance to make about $125 profit. This can be done over and over again on many different items!
What have we learned here?
Find items to buy low on Craigslist, then turn around and flip them on eBay for a nice profit. There aren’t a whole lot of people doing this yet, and if you live in a small to mid size city, you might be sitting on a goldmine. This can be a very quick and easy way to make money online!
Blogging Your Way to an Online Income
As I am sure you already know blogging is HUGE right now. If you don’t know what blogging is then you have obviously not spent a lot of time online in the past few years. Blogging is one of the most popular ways of sharing information online and building websites for just about any topic. Where people used to build simple websites, they are now starting blogs. They are also a great way to start an online home business. People have blogs for pretty much every subject under the sun. There are blogs about entertainment, science, politics, parenting, sports, animals, and lots of blogs about how to make money online!
One of the big reasons for starting blogs is their ease of use and the fact that they can be a great way to make money online if you are willing to devote the time and energy required to keep the blog going. There is more to blogging than simply putting up some basic information or a picture and then throwing up some Adsense code around it.
There are plenty of ways you can use blogging to make money online and here are some of the most popular:
Paid Advertising
There are plenty of advertising programs on the internet that are blog-friendly and depending on the popularity of your blog, you can generate anywhere from a few dollars every month to a few thousand dollars a day! Adsense is a very popular way to make money from putting advertising on a blog.
However, if Adsense isn’t your thing there are plenty of alternatives. There are quite a few good revenue share advertising programs that will sell ads for you and give a percentage of the profits. You could also look into selling advertising independently. If you have some marketing and networking experience and know how to edit your templates then selling advertising yourself is a great way to make money online and you get to keep 100% of the profits!
Affiliate Marketing
A blog is a great way to showcase affiliate links, particularly if your blog is about a specific niche. In fact, if you are a “niche blogger” affiliate links can generate more income for you than you can make with advertising. There are tons of affiliate programs out there. Just be careful not to overload your blog with affiliate links. A blog with more affiliate links than useful and original content is a total turn off and will not make you nearly as much money!
Media
For most bloggers this will never happened but there are some bloggers who make such a big name for themselves that they become a famous in the media. It takes a long time to get to this point (if you can ever do it at all), but it’s possible. For example; look at someone like Perez Hilton. He has managed to make a name for himself outside of the blogosphere and is now rich and famous due to his blogging efforts. In order to achieve this though you have to be very patient, very dedicated to your blog and stand out from every other blogger competing with you.
As you can see, there are plenty of ways that you can use blogging to build an online income or even propel yourself to celebrity status. Above I have listed just a few ways that you could use blogging make money online. There are more so get out there and start blogging your heart out!