Online Business

When you’re struggling, living paycheck to paycheck, striving towards minimizing your overall living expenses and bringing more money into the household should definitely be on your to-do list. While minimizing your expenses can be as simple as nixing fast food or moving to a smaller apartment, it’s often the “making more money” part that’s most daunting.

The truth is that you can stop struggling to get by. Soon, you’ll be able to take your spouse out for a nice dinner and still afford to pay your bills on time. Building a passive income online is your ticket to financial security!

You won’t earn thousands of dollars overnight; legitimate methods of building passive income aren’t get rich quick schemes. Building passive income online will take hard work, hours of research, and patience to surmount the learning curve. But, if you’re willing to work hard now, you’ll earn big rewards later.

Here are five ideas that’ll help you build passive income online:

1. Start a blog. Throughout the startup phase, building your blogging empire will take up quite a bit of your time. You’ll need to respond to reader comments, interact with other bloggers, and create daily posts just to earn dimes. But, once you’ve established an online presence with your blog, you can expect to earn in the range of $100 to over $1,000 per month, just for sharing your thoughts and opinions.

* Bloggers earn money through several different avenues. However, some of the most common and basic methods of earning passive income through a blog are Google’s Adsense program and other comparable pay-per-click systems, private advertisers, and affiliate commissions.

2. Write articles for ad sharing websites. Ad sharing websites allow you to post articles to their website directory and earn ad revenue each time a visitor clicks on an advertisement next to your article.

* Taking part in work at home forums is an effective way of getting leads to some of the highest paying ad revenue websites. Some examples of successful ad revenue websites are eHow.com, Bukisa.com and Suite101.com.

3. Flip blogs for quick cash. Once you get the hang of it, flipping blogs can be a quick way to make money within just a few hours. Simply purchase a domain name (new or aged), find a unique WordPress theme, and post content on your new blog. After you’ve successfully set up the blog, place it for sale on an auction website, such as Flippa.com or Sitepoint.com.

4. Sell stock photography. If you’re a brilliant photographer, put your artistic skills to use and sell stock photography online. Capture images of scenes you think will sell well. Then, visually enhance the photos in Photoshop, if necessary, and place them for sale on websites like Fotolia.com or iStockPhotos.com.

* Sales may be slow at first, but remember you’re building passive income that treats you to some nice checks month after month. Once you’ve built up an inventory of several dozen photos, sales will begin to pick up.

5. Become an affiliate marketer. As an affiliate marketer, you’ll promote other people’s products online for a commission. Each time you make a sale, you’ll be paid up to 75% of the sale price. Most people who succeed in this field focus on promoting products through article marketing and email marketing campaigns, but there are several strategies you can quickly learn.

* Writing two articles is unlikely to result in a sale. Write 20 articles and you’re chances increase exponentially. Write 200 articles and you’ll get the ball rolling on some nice commissions.

In time, you’ll be able to pay costly bills and plan vacations without dipping into your paychecks. The key to ultimate success is the ability to remain focused on the end result. Allow your desires to fuel your drive toward financial security. An optimistic mindset and persistence in working to achieve your goal will see you through to online success.

A “squeeze page” (or some people called it “Landing page”, “opt-in page”) exists for one crucial purpose: to turn readers into subscribers. Subscribers – not readers – make up your email list, which exists so you can track your traffic and conversions, and legally send each member emails without it being considered “spam”.

How does a squeeze page get readers to part with their name and email address? It literally “squeezes” the reader until he feels he has no choice but to give up the contact information you’re requesting – because he wants your irresistible bribe or lure that much! He may not even want to subscribe to yet another list – but he will subscribe to yours.

There are things you must and must not do, in order to create this highly desirable outcome:

DO…
…research and get to know your target niche down to the smallest detail, starting with:
• General Subject – E.G.: Cooking
• Niche – E.G.: Mexican Cooking
• Sub-Niche – E.G: Corn dishes

…include bullet points to list the main selling points. Remember…
• Bullet
• Points
• Work

…include a call to action.

DON’T…

…put any other link but your sign up box on your squeeze page. (It’s not there to make a sale or divert them to an affiliate product – it’s there solely to convert readers into registered subscribers!)

… make your squeeze pages overly long. Include just enough detail to get the job done and inspire the reader to sign up. Something as small as a one-page sign up box will work better than a six page sales letter.

…forget your only job is to MAKE YOUR READER BEG FOR MORE.

That’s the single most important secret of squeeze page success!

Click here to follow future SETTING UP A SALES FUNNEL course

How To Set Up Your First Profit Pulling Sales Funnel

Every internet marketer who sticks with it longer than a few months ends up with a general idea of what a “sales funnel” ought to look like. The trouble is…
A. You often find out about sales funnels too far onwards into your marketing journey. The sales funnel you hastily create as a result ends up more as a “patch” or afterthought on your marketing strategies, instead of a vital component in your initial long-term plan.
B. And this is the biggie – everyone tends to think in “Perfect Diagram” mode.

What is “Perfect Diagram” mode? It’s the phenomenon that occurs after a lifetime of reading textbooks and picture books. People imagine simplistic, textbook perfection

When in reality, until you become a seasoned, experienced internet marketer, if your first sale funnel could be rendered or “translated” realistically.

So… are you really doomed to mess up your first sales funnel, so that it looks like something from a carnival Hall of Mirrors, or a psychedelic scene out of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland?”

Of course not. This only occurs because people do not understand all the different components that go into creating a successful sales funnel. Take care of learning about the different components, set each one up properly – and your funnel will be 50% perfect!

So… what do you need to do, to take care of the OTHER 50%?

You need to have that long-term marketing plan – so your sales funnel can play an important part towards bringing your goals to successful fruition.

There are dozens of reports and posts out there, dealing with “making a long-term marketing plan”, so that’s not going to be our primary focus today, though we will cover the basics. Instead, we’re going to take a good look at every single funnel element, so your plan won’t have any invisible gaps – the sort that quickly cause problems like unnecessary leaks and bottlenecks.
You need to know how to effectively use:
* Squeeze pages
* Entry points
* Freebies
* Low end offers
* $1 offers
* Upsells
* Downsells
* Cross sells
* OTOs (one-time offers)
* Repackaging
* Repurposing
* Recurring income products and services

You’ll also need to know how to perform specific functions:
* Incorporating affiliate products into your sales funnel
* Leading the customer up through different price points
* Collecting opt ins
* Building buyers list and prospects list
* Separating the two lists

We’re going to cover those too – as well as intersperse them with 2 Sales Funnel Super Tips – and 12 Sales Funnel Mistakes – and more.

Click here to follow future SETTING UP A SALES FUNNEL course

Tagging and pinging are common terms used in social bookmarking and web publishing, and it’s important to learn how to do both effectively when you need the top rankings on sites and search engines. Search engines and social bookmarking aggregators work in very similar ways, and the most effective strategy for gaining prominence in either of these is to code your copy correctly!

TAGGING: WHAT IS IT?

Developing search-engine friendly copy has become even easier with the introduction of tagging widgets on a variety of web publishing interfaces. Tagging is simply a process of breaking down your submissions into keywords. Keywords of relevance are usually general in scope, and will make your copy fit into a variety of indexes and categories with a few simple tweaks.

Consider tagging to be a condensed version of your main idea. This is an effective approach when you are trying to make sense of the process, and the best way to do it is to start with your heading and title. Your title will serve as the main source of indexing by search engines, and you can make it stand out even more by adding relevant tags.

As a general rule, you’ll want to make sure you are also using the appropriate tags and meta-tags in descriptions and heading titles. Some search engines use these areas to index anything you publish, and it’s important that they are relevant and free of spam.

Still, tagging within a social bookmarking site offers multiple benefits. Many social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Technorati make use of tag clouds that break out each article and section it off to different categories. Using keywords such as ‘internet’ or ‘computer’ for example will automatically list your article or submission in both areas. It’s just another way for users to find articles or entries of relevance; whenever they click on one of these tag clouds, a full listing of articles with those tags will show up on their screen.

A growing number of portals and websites are offering tagging systems to index content. This is especially helpful for blogs and other larger resources where context is highly important. Think about the millions of articles and entries on the web today, and how difficult it would be for someone to find your specific article if they could only find you with a few keywords. Tagging helps to create context and relevance within different categories, and once a user has reached the social bookmarking platform; it makes it much easier to find you.

More people are becoming comfortable and familiar with using tag clouds to group and find the information they need; your website can reach a much wider audience when it’s easily found in a variety of areas, instead of just under one content page or index.

As each social bookmarking site indexes and aggregates the incoming data, patterns of tags start to emerge; the more popular a particular theme or idea becomes, the larger the tag cloud. You’ll notice this as you review different tag clouds, and you’ll see some words standing out far more than others. This means that more people are submitting articles with the same tags, and more people are viewing them. It’s an easy way to monitor and review how well specific topics are doing at any given time.

TAGGING: HOW TO DO IT

Tagging each entry you submit will become a habit, but you do need to make sure that the tags are relevant and free of spam. Only use keywords that actually apply to your entry; if you start using extra words simply to gain exposure or search engine placement, another user may report it and you may be forced off the network.

Think of tagging as labeling all of your data; you are creating an easily index-able system so that search engines and social bookmarking sites can find and place your article. Breaking down your article into a ‘notes’ form is a very effective strategy for rising to prominence!

You’ll need to break down your main idea into general topics, then narrow it down to more specific keywords. Titles in your article are a good way to start, and you do not need to include words such as ‘the’, ‘it’, or ‘a’. If you do, the tagging system will usually just take them out. Be sure to pick keywords that classify your submission the best; while there are no limits to the number of tags you can add, it’s important to limit them to only those of relevance.

PINGING: WHAT IS IT?

Pinging has quickly become a popular activity with the social networking boom, and in most cases it is an automatic process. Pinging is the process of identifying your IP address and making sure that it is a valid address for search engines. Pings identify the web address to various hosts, and once the address is verified, it can be networked and updated in search engines and indexes.

Bloggers make use of pinging when in cases where posts are not updated automatically. Pinging allows the user to update search engines and various indexes that a new blog posting has been submitted. This is necessary for indexing purposes only, and can help search engine spiders and indexers ‘pick up’ your submission much faster. Old search engine strategies required manually entering sites and submissions for pinging; today, however, most publishing platforms take care of this process automatically.

There are several ways in which you can organize your business. As a new business owner you need to choose the right business structure for yourself and get protection from general legal liabilities and aim to secure excellent tax breaks from the entity of business that you are going to choose.

Here are some of the most common ways to organize your business:

Sole Proprietorships: This kind of business is owned by one person and is not registered with the state. Nothing special needs to be done and no legal paperwork is necessary to setup a sole proprietorship firm. Legally, the owner of a sole proprietorship firm is completely responsible for its functioning, i.e. he is responsible for all kind of losses incurred and/or legal issues that may crop up.

Partnerships: Partnerships are businesses that have more than one owner. They are similar to Sole Proprietorship and do not need to be registered by the state. The partnerships owners are liable to pay taxes on only their share of incomes and are each personally responsible for their proportional amounts of business debts and claims.

Sole Proprietorships and partnerships make good sense in small businesses where a comparatively less amount of money is involved.

Limited Partnerships – These are a lot more complicated and costlier to run and are not in tune with the needs of the small business owner. One person who in turn solicits investments from other owners called limited partners owns what is called, a Limited Partnership. The general partner is in charge of all operations and personally liable for losses and legal affairs.

Limited Liability Company – Operating an LLC is a lot more complicated and costly, but does the trick for many mid sized businesses. In LLCs’ the personal liability of the owner for business debts and court judgments is limited. They are different form all other types of businesses in a way that they are independent as a legal and tax enterprise from the people who own and manage it. This means that the corporation pays its taxes itself.

LLCs’ are great for owners who have a good chance of being sued by customers or getting into large debts or if they have huge personal assets, which they need to protect.

Non Profit Corporations – These corporations are specifically formed for educational, religious, charitable or scientific purposes. These institutions raise funds from private or public donations and are generally exempted from tax payments in lieu of their non-money making nature.

Cooperatives – Cooperatives are businesses that are formed and operated democratically by all its members. Most states have strict laws that deal with the setting up and running of cooperatives and proper paperwork must be done in order to have your cooperative institution formally recognized by the state. You can contact your State’s Office in order to procure additional information.

Choosing the right kind of business structure is very important and may have a make or break effect on your business.