This gentleman wrote me because he wanted to start a side business online and return to a rural lifestyle away from the city. However, he couldn’t think of an idea for his online business!

Although this email is quite old (2004) and has focus on info-products and ebay selling (two areas which are harder to make money at now), the premise still stands. You must have a passion and an interest in your business to really make it online.

‘Making it online’ could be making money, making a name for yourself, or making a website that grows to huge proportion and has an exit strategy.

The conversation begins with defining yourself, your hobbies, your interests and ends with an idea for an online business.

Ideas for Online Business – Ask Laura (August 30, 2004)

Hello Laura:

I am 48 and my wife is 38. We have no kids living with us. My wife is from a town of about 15,000 in Indiana, and I grew up in a town about the same size in California. We have lived in *edited* for the last 12 years. The income here is good, and housing can be had for a reasonable percent of your wages.

Unfortunately, there is no time to enjoy much.

Work hours and commutes are long and any recreation you think of to do, there is already a crowd there with the same idea.

My wife is an administrative assistant and I have spent the last 30 some years working in the parts department at Chrysler dealerships. We both enjoy being creative and crafty. I also enjoy wood working and building something out of salvage or scrap pieces, and enjoy home improvement projects (I’m a HGTV junkie).

Anything where I can be creative would be interesting to me. My wife likes to crochet and also has recently gotten into candle making. Anyhow, we both crave a simpler, less harried lifestyle.

Thanks again for your consultation.

Blane

*****************

Blane:

Some of the more obvious ways to make money online is ebay selling and info product creation.

Now I don’t know much about ebay selling (other than I first started this way as well). I used to buy junk chandeliers for $1-5, paint them, repair the wiring, etc. and sell them for $150-200 each. It was fun to do, satisfied my artistic side and made me some quick cash. But it wasn’t a lucrative use of my time (dollar/hour) – I had to find these vintage chandeliers, then do repair and decoration work, then post them on ebay, then package them for postal delivery, etc.

I am aware however that many people make huge dollars on ebay with less work. I can’t say for sure, but I believe they use drop-shippers to handle all the packaging and shipping. You choose the product line, promote it, send them the orders, and they handle the rest. As I said, I’m not sure if that’s how the ‘big’ money is being made on ebay, but I do know that many people are making a killing on ebay…

Now here is something that may interest you, to capitalize on the eBay brand, deliver value to people and make money online too. Lots of people make money simply by promoting the use of ebay! For every new person you can get to sign up to use eBay, eBay pays you a minimum of $12 USD! I make over $100 month on one of my sites just from people registering new accounts with eBay.

The other way to make money online is info products (which is one of my ‘things’). Talk about awesome! You put together a little book, set up a pay page, and away you go… this is probably what you’ve already read of mine.

With your crafty talents I’d suggest something like this…do you have a piece that you have made, or that you know is being made and is selling like hotcakes somewhere?

I’ll give you an example:

My husband makes these twig lights when he was laid off for the winter he made a pile of them, and sold them at my friend’s shop for $85 (she added her percentage in, which made them $170). People bought these like crazy.

Some people said “I can make these myself…” and went home and tried. Reporting back to the store they said they could make them, and they looked alright but it took a long time, and they didnt’ look as nice as Eric’s.

Now, had we been smart we could have also supplied the shop with an info product (make your own twig lamp). And, if we had the time or the interest we could probably sell an info product on making twig lamps for other crafters.

My point is, if you can take something you love to do, that has a following or interest online (for instance my goat book – who would have thought that an info book on goats would be a good seller?), you’ll be off and running.

And if it only manages to replace part of your current income, then make another info book, and another, until you have more than one stream of income. I have 4 info products, plus multiple other streams. They replace my old income of designing sites online and I do little through the work week to support or promote these items. Now (2004) I’m in a position where I can (a) help others, and (b) work towards replacing my husband’s income.

I’ve been rambling here…but I hope some of it helps to move you forward…think on all this, what your talents and interests are, etc. and feel free to write me back – collaboration is a wonderful thing!

Laura

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The 2007 Way to Make Money Partnering with EBAY

As I mentioned above, eBay pays website owners to send them traffic. New account setups will net you a minimum of $12 per person, but eBay also pays you for any sale you help them make. Their affiliate program is on a sliding scale, often with incentives and bonuses (which we can talk about another day). In the final months of 2006 I’ve been experimenting with a script that builds websites loaded with eBay products, all embedded with your referral link.

You can build custom websites with no html or php experience, that have serious potential to make you money online in less than an hour – start to finish. Instead of getting into how this works or how easy it is, I’m providing a free report that explains how to do this for all my online website visitors. Click: learn how to set up a website that makes money from eBay sales without having to sell a product! It’s a quick 4 pages and has a link within to a demo site where you can see and try it out for yourself.

************

Last names and email addresses are never disclosed on this website, but proof of all email communication can be provided upon request. These emails are published solely to help and assist others with similar questions, situations and problems with getting their online business started or making their website business more successful.

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Dear Laura,

Good Morning! I’ve been reading through www.smartzville.com, and keep running into new ideas on new pages. And I’ve found out that I’ve made what may be a definate beginners mistake. Without doing enough research, and going on what I thought was a really good idea (since I loved it), I went out and plopped down $45 for a domain name and hosting account. Then I went back and started reading the sites of people like yourself, Brooks Owen (big in mail order), Jim Edwards, Michael Campbell, Joe Garris, and such and went “oh crap, bad move”.

So, after a day of “oh well”, I read some more, and I found a really good idea. And honestly this idea was so simple and so much of a zebra in a herd of milking cows that I just wondered why I didn’t think about it before. What’s the idea? Simple, find an already running site, grab it, and do a little remodling to make it better.

After doing more research on words and searches (like I should have done first), going on eBay was like going into a supermarket looking for just the right brand. Mind you, there are alot of junk sites, half baked ideas, and domains that you would never think of trying, on eBay. But, after two days and about four hours each day, I found two good brands. And what’s really sad, is I only paid about $48 for both, hosting and all. All set up, and one even comes with a product in hand.

The one with the product is …url removed…, and is not all the way transfered and up yet. It comes with a credit repair guide for $14.95 that you can download. The other site, …url removed…, is a site designed for downloadable scripts, ebooks, tools, and software. This site is up and running, but has no product yet. Both sites come with blog, newsletters, chat rooms, and multiple subdomains. Both sites can have individual sales letters within their own subdomains and the purchase button going to a Paypal account. Both sites can also have affiliate links and banner ads so I can get more income off the main pages.

Anyhow, I was thinking of putting some of your items on the second site, as well as content from Jim Edwards and some others. Eventually I will put my own ebooks (when they get written) up as well. I’m trying not to spend too much more since I’ve already gone $100 into this without one sale yet (and half of that was a misstep). And sadly, all I need is $900 a month to replace my current income. Do you know of any other good programs or affiliates to look into? Is there a way to research to find more? Are there any more costs that I need to be aware of?

Well, thanks for the help.

William

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Dear William:

By the way, it’s great to hear from you again!

My friend to be honest, I liked your first idea. It was original. I’m not sure where you’re going with it, but I envision it to be personable, interesting and has the potential to grow quite a following. Please don’t give up on it just yet – a lot of times a first inspiration (especially when you started with a love for it) is one of the best ideas ever!

And don’t bemoan spending $50 for start up. A few years ago we all had to pay $45 year just to register our domain names! And hosting used to be out of this world. I once worked for my hosting – exchanging hours in lieu of a hosting fee each month!

Now I can’t say much about your new credit site, because all I can see is a parked page, but I urge you to not buy any more sites off ebay without dropping me a line first. For instance some of those existing sites may be blacklisted, been used for spam in the past, and/or are cookie cutter sites. There are ways of checking first, before you bid.

A download site and a credit repair site may seem perfect at first blush, but it may be some work gaining the traffic and clientelle to make them lucrative. There’s just so much competition and only so many things to write about much less originality to set yourself apart.

For instance look at this http://www.digitalshelf .net/ and this http://www.lmphotonics .com/dlstore/index.php and this http://wizzworldwide .net/ and this http://eworldcenter .net/downloadstore and http://wubs-hub.tripod .com/ and http://www.marketandpromote .com

All copycats of the site you bought. There are many more. As I suspect, the same is true with credit repair.

I am not trying to burst your bubble, I’m just making sure you don’t buy more sites on ebay, and that you know that you must rewrite every bit of text on those new sites or you’ll never get any search engine traffic.

Google in particular does not like duplicate content or cookie cutter sites.

The only other expense I could alert you to is an autoresponder account for website subscriptions (once you start getting traffic you’ll want to start getting that traffic to subscribe so you can continue to keep them updated and promote products that will help them).

Drop me back a note if you want to talk more about any of this.

Laura

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Back and forth our conversation went. Eventually William decided (on his own) to rewrite the content on the cookie cutter sites he bought on ebay and continue on with his original idea – which was really quite good and I hope one day I can link to it to show you. He’s an original person with an original idea, just like you are, and that is where the potential to make money online lies!

William did write back again shortly after and said this:

“…and now the stupid news. The person who sold me the credit repair site still has yet to send me a copy of the site so that I can make changes. I cannot change the contact info nor the paypal info pages. I don’t even know what the downloadable product looks like due to I can’t seem to find it, but it’s for sale for $19.95. I should have seen this coming I guess. I’m sure this would make a good lesson for your readers. Thanks again, William”

Friends the big lesson of this story is be careful of what you buy on ebay websites. Although there are some smokin’ deals and some good sites available for just the right person to take to the next level, there are also some real duds, just selling a dream. Remember too that some of the auction sellers are as brilliant at copywriting as my good friend Joe Vitale! The only difference is that Joe serves up value with integrity to his customers…

Laura Childs
www.makemoneywithyourideas.com

******

Parts of this correspondence have been edited to protect the identity of the email author. I will not publish last names, urls or email addresses (unless given express permission by the owner). Each letter has been stored on my private files however to supply to the authorites if need be. I urge you to follow a similar practice whenever you you publish, sell, or reference another online.

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Dear Laura,

Well, to put it shortly, I’ve been busy. In the past few weeks I’ve managed to pick up 25 or so ebooks for $19.95 from ebay, and about 1000 templates for websites for $10. But, let’s not say that it may be wasted money, because the education that came with pouring over all the new information was well worth the cost.

I’ve managed to aquire a few master resell rights and get myself onto about five different marketer newsletters….This all reminds me of years ago when you would see ads for resale rights in income making magazines. It’s the same game, but with modern spins and new faces.

I’m guessing that with the resell rights I now have, I could get some money coming in. The trick is to write my own letters and make some projects that fit the formula that everyone else seems to follow. I don’t want to go with “marketing” as a niche though. It seems so filled up with more and more names that wouldn’t really mean much to the average person. So I need to find my own path, and make use of the research I’ve gained so far.

But, first things first. Like I said, I picked up some master resale rights to a few products. How do I change the “changeable” parts of the sales letters to brand them as mine? Second, I have at least two PDF files that I want to sell on ebay for now, but do I need to have them on a website of their own for people to gain access to them after the purchase? Which leads to the last question. Do I need a separate page for each downloadable item, or can they be grouped onto one page?

Oh, the ebooks I picked up range from…..to an HTML editor to a FTP freeware package. I originally started with a purchase of an ebook on how to resell webhosting. That led to another page where I found 25 more ebooks, and I just went on from there. And the more I read, the more I find, and the more time gets spent roaming the internet marketplace. So far I’ve seen sites from the very useful, to sites where it’s just one long sales pitch of blatent “buy my junk” sputtered out over and over on one long page. And does everyone call themselves great just because they managed to get a site up and running and a few sales?

Anyhow, thanks for reading.

Bill

*************

Hi Bill!

You’ve been having fun! Just don’t get too deep into all of it that you never actually accomplish anything. One thing, done poorly, is far better than one thing not done at all.

I’ve got server issues to deal with the next few days but I felt that I should at least send you a quick note.

Use your html editor that you bought to make changes to those sales letters.

Unless you’re selling everything as one big package you need separate download pages for each product.

I’m not much of an ebay seller so I can’t comment on what works there and why…alot of the stuff on ebay has already saturated the market, especially the marketing and website management stuff (you’re right).

I agree. It’s the same game – direct marketing, only online. There’s a number of ways it’s done – draw the customer in with a high priced item and then sell them low priced stuff later vs. draw them in with a low priced item then upsell them with the big tickets.

If you’re just struggling over the download issue and you’re only going to be selling on ebay – you can email your buyers the files at a later date – just say so in your auction (product will be delivered within 24 hours of auction close by email, if you haven’t received your product within 24 hours please contact me at you@youremail.com).

The biggest headache of being in the marketing niche isn’t so much making a name for yourself as it is living up to that name. You’re a public figure and people expect greatness from you. They want you to answer all their questions, they are often abusive (you wouldn’t believe the nasty stuff people have sent me!), and they’ll even send you emails saying things like “what are you working on now? I want to know what direction to go into so that I can be one step ahead of you.” What the heck is that? And, they watch your sites (once they know what they are) like a hawk and often duplicate your market. I’ve learned to start making my new sites private. Anyway, apart from being a name among many there are a pile of reasons why I wouldn’t wish this gig on most people.

On the other hand, “And does everyone call themselves great just because they managed to get a site up and running and a few sales?” They have to call themselves great – it’s part of the story that the consumer buys into. Just a few sales? You’d be surprised how much money is made online from crappy sites. It even boggles my mind.

Anyway, I’m knee-deep in code and config errors on 6 different sites (one of the reasons you don’t want to host your sites with a fly-by-night hosting company – because they don’t know the first thing about customer service, or for that matter how to fix server issues), so I’d better run.

Laura Childs
www.makemoneywithyourideas.com

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Some parts of this letter have been edited out to protect the integrity of ideas from the email author. And although I will not post first and last names (unless given express permission) of my email writers, I can prove the validity of each letter written including email addresses, dates, and headers to the authorites if need be. I suggest that everything you publish online, sell online, or reference online, have a similar back up system in place.

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