I could write a whole book about this, and maybe I will.
In this short space I can tell you that the most money to be made, with the most control, is often from your own products and services.
Often there is more money to be made quickly in services – if you’re looking to create seed money, find out what a large pool of people online have troube doing, and offer to take it off their hands. If you can find a way to automate this, even better – then you’ll spend most of your time getting clients and providing any necessary support, instead of actually spending the bulk of your time performing the service, just make sure it gets done right the first time.
The problem with providing a service, such as consulting, is that it can take up a lot of your time. I’ve had to limit my consulting services severely – when I got sick again, it just became too much of a draw on my time.
This is largely because the best way I know how to make money is always somehow connected to my writing.
I love to write. And I seem to have knack for helping people and writing instructional literature. So I write mostly ebooks, articles, and content for sites. But instead of shopping those services out to others most of the time, I make a bigger profit from writing, even for the free content on my blog, than I ever did offering my services.
In this way, I’m able to combine the model of writing content for money with the model of selling books I’ve written, to create a system for myself that focuses on a very small area of a large market. Instead of getting paid per display of my pages, or per sale of someone else’s product, I calculate how many leads I can generate from new content in my site.
I get these leads from my news feed, from search engine results that are prompted by updates to my feed, and also largely from articles of mine that end up in other peope’s feeds, on their sites, or in their ezines. There are other sources of leads, but by far, these are the top three pushing people who have the highest tendency to conver.
This cuts down greatly on the time it takes me to promote my site, so I have far more time to create new products to sell, and thus, continue to increase my income. So much so that I had time to write about that process as well.
So how do you start this process if you don’t already have a product or service? How do you come up with a spectacular product/service, and more importantly, find a buyer.
It’s been said before but it’s worth repeating: find the market first, then research their needs, and finally, give them the product they want. Find yourself a little pond and be the big fish in it.
Then find yourself another pond to add to it, because you will surely have competition in your neck of the woods sooner or later.
When I first started out creating information products, I needed one thing – seed money. I needed to have enough money to put all the tools I could need together to promote my book once I created it. Since I was going to write about free traffic, I had to spend money to have a more sophisticated test of what works, and what doesn’t.
Then of course I had to build the web site, get hosting, get the software I’d need, pay an editor when I needed one, pay a graphic designer when I needed one, all of these things were going to be crucial to my success – the traffic part I had taken care of already.
So how do you generate seed money? Two words, affiliate programs. And that will be my next topic, in about half an hour.
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