The most important thing is to stay focused. Don’t jump from one idea to the next without following through with them. As you go through different steps you will see what works for you. If you jump from one to the other without seeing if it succeeds or fails, you are bound to stand at a stalemate.

Be committed to what you are doing. Running a business involves work and needs to be treated as so. If you are going to be lackadaisical about your efforts, there is little chance you will see any results, and you will most likely end up frustrated and quitting.

Implement these strategies and follow through:

Profit Making Tip # 1: Offer Time-Sensitive Discounts.

When your prospects see that they have a chance of getting a good deal, that’s the first step to grabbing their attention. Offering discounts on products you are promoting is a great way to drive extra customers your way.

This is easily accomplished by simply talking to the product owner of whatever it is you are an affiliate for. Every owner has discounts available; and if they don’t, it’s very easy for them to create one. Add your own bonuses and create a deadline for the special offer, and you will see your sales skyrocketing.

If you are already driving decent traffic and giving good business to the product owners, they will have no problem creating a coupon code or special bargain exclusive for your prospects.

Profit Making Tip # 2: Use Social Networks.

Taking advantage of social networks is a highly effective and yet somewhat untapped way of getting exposure. Sites like Facebook, Myspace and YouTube have taken the internet world by storm.

They allow you to really connect with your audience and get direct feedback on what’s working, what’s not working, and what they want.

By consistently updating the public about what’s going on inside your business – any changes, news, and any new product or service offers – you will instill a lot of trust and reliability in your company.

Profit Making Tip # 3: Diversify.

If you are already doing well with one or two products, then why not go for number three and four?

A lot of people stay focused on promoting one product and one product only. Now this is good, at first; but after you’ve accomplished this and you know the steps to gain income from a product, you need to expand your horizons.

In the same respect, you do not want to get too carried away and start promoting too many products. This can cause confusion and you may end up leaving some of your projects unattended for a while.

Profit Making Tip # 4: Build A List.

Once you are driving good traffic to your sites and you have been cashing in on commissions or steady payments (if you’re promoting your own product), you need to focus on gathering contact information from your customers.

Instead of selling this one person on one product one time, you can capture their name and email, and then market other good products and opportunities to them.

Offer a free quality report in exchange for giving their name and email, and then you can direct them to the product’s page right after.

Profit Making Tip # 5: Advertise Yourself Aggressively.

If you haven’t noticed, there are ads everywhere on the internet. Well all of these ads come back to someone or some company who started an advertising campaign.

Taking advantage of Google Adwords and Yahoo Ads can give an incredible boost to your profits. There are quite a few places you can set up accounts and start campaigns so research them, and make sure to find the one that is right for you and your needs.

It’s easy to start an advertising campaign that you pay per click. This is a small amount (usually measured in cents) of money that you pay each time someone clicks on your ad and visits your site. After doing some good research, you can see what should be in your ad to grab people’s attention and drive them to you.

Using these strategies can drastically improve your profits. You need to stick with them and follow through. Do not jump around and try every possible technique to increasing profits, or you will end up not doing any of them very well. Stay focused and keep moving forward, so you can increase your profits in a short amount of time.

Keeping everything together and organized is a great way to stay on top of what you’re doing. Write down what you need to do, like a check list, and follow through with it. You must stay on track and continue on with what you’re doing until it either succeeds or fails.

To Your Success!

Warm Regards,
Jeremy Gislason
Follow us on Twitter at:
http://twitter.com/SureFireWealth

Want to reach Internet Marketing top gun status in no time? Now you can get a FREE test drive to elevn of our most popular and useful five-star home business membership sites!

Join the lucky few to have full top-level lifetime access to each one of these internet marketing membership sites at www.PrivilegedMemberships.com

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

How many times have you seen somebody try to assemble something using written instructions that come with the product? How many times have you seen the anger and frustration that goes with it? Maybe it was you.

A lot of people get frustrated with the written word; they need to watch and hear step-by-step instructions instead of just read them. If you can make a video for one of your products and give people an easy-to-follow visual demonstration, you will get a lot more customers and establish a great reputation for being the go-to person in that niche.

Here is a step-by-step formula for creating instructional videos. Some of these steps may seem very obvious, but leave one out and the videos might not turn out to be as good as they could actually be.

Video Creation Step # 1: Brainstorm A Unique Idea.

The beginning of anything is always an idea. No matter what kind of niche you are in, you can create some kind of instructional video to demonstrate how to get something done, fix a problem or try something new.

Thousands of potentially new customers go to YouTube and many other video sites every day. They want to buy a product, but they simply do not understand how to use it. Some people need to be shown what the product does and how it works before they will even consider buying it. These are the people you’re going to target.

You should do some research and find out what people in your niche need help with. In many cases, it can be something very simple that you have never thought of.

An example of this might be a dog-training site that you own. If you send out an e-mail to your customers and ask them what problems they are having with dog training, a lot of them might answer that they simply do not have the time. At this point you can consider making a video called ” How to find the time to train your dog”. Very simple and basic, however something that can lead to a lot of sales. How many of your customers are not buying the newest and greatest dog training book simply because they do not know how to find the time to train their dog?

Video Creation Step # 2: Write It Out.

You need to write out what you are going to video before doing it. This needs to be in a list form with a lot of bulleted notes.

You do not want to write something out and read it because people will know that you are reading from notes. Most people can’t stand it if they think you are just reading off of paper.

Write down a step-by-step guide of what you want to cover in your video and then make sub-points in bulleted form. This will help you stay on track without giving you notes to read.
Video Creation Step # 3: Rehearse And Tape.

You need to start rehearsing before you start taping and the best way to do this is in front of the mirror. Some people find it very hard to do this, but it is the only way to see how you are actually going to appear on camera.

Everything you say and do will be noticed by your audience. Every facial expression needs to be watched during your rehearsal and corrected if necessary. One small scowl out of place will turn your customers off.

Many times you may not even realize that you do such a thing. This is why it is important to practice in front of a mirror until you feel you’ve got it right. When you feel you’ve got it right, then on to the taping.

Video Creation Step # 4: Edit Or Redo.

Don’t expect that the taping will be done in just one sitting. You are bound to make mistakes the first couple of times you start taping. You may mispronounce words, start laughing or just forget everything you’re about to say. This is natural and normal.

You may have to do some editing on the tape to cut things out and you may have to redo the taping a few times until you feel it is right. Take the time to make a good video and your audience will appreciate it.

Video Creation Step # 5: Send It Out.

When it is ready, send it up to video-sharing sites like YouTube, Metacafe, Revver, AOL, Google videos, Yahoo videos, etc. Use video submission software like Tubemogul to submit the video simultaneously to a variety of video-sharing sites, but make sure you read the terms of each site first before using any software. (Some of them prohibit the use of any mass submission software.)

Exposure to these video sites means traffic (lots of it if you do it right), and traffic means sales and income. If you need some help with this, you can outsource the work very easily to a freelancer.

Once you see how it easy it is to actually get your instructional videos up and running, you will be determined to do more. Don’t ignore this vital promotional tool simply because you have not done it before. You know that you are leaving customers on the table if you don’t present videos and keep up with the marketing times.

To Your Success!

Warm Regards,
Jeremy Gislason
Follow us on Twitter at:
http://twitter.com/SureFireWealth

Want to reach Internet Marketing top gun status in no time? Now you can get a FREE 30-day test drive to ten of the most popular and useful five-star home business membership sites! Join the lucky few to have full top-level lifetime access to each one of these internet marketing membership sites at www.PrivilegedMemberships.com

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Front end sales are the products and services you can quickly sell to your customers. This is where you make a fast return on your goods. Back end sales include the things that you sell to those clients later on, through return business, additional services or affiliate programs. Sure, it’s rewarding to make those fast front end sales, but it’s also a lot more work to get those sales made. With back end sales you will build more lucrative and long-lasting wealth that can maintain and grow your business over time with much less effort spent.

The business funnel concept is nothing new in the marketing world. Retailers use this all the time. For example, let’s look at the local grocery store. Every week, they send out ads selling items at low prices, some even offering buy one get one free deals to consumers.

The advertisements are what get customers like you in the door to take advantage of these front-end sales items. But what the grocery store knows is that you will more than likely walk out of the store with an additional $40 worth of grocery purchases because smart consumers get everything they need for their household in one trip to save on gas and time. While the front end items may have cost you around $20 or so and saved you a good deal of money, the additional purchases you made are how the store made its real profits. In other words, the small end of the funnel was the sales items, the bigger end of the funnel and profits were the large grocery purchase you just made.

Many business owners concentrate too much on the front end sales, but the smart business owner will offer front end items but concentrate more on the back end profits they can potentially make. Likewise, if you are a business owner and you have a website where you can advertise your products, specials and other information about your company, you can take advantage of the business funnel idea to increase profits and make more money for your company.

Recently, BusinessWeek offered a webcast about “Turning the Reverse Funnel Upside Down” (Ron Hubsher, BusinessWeekOnline.com) What the author and host of this webcast was trying to promote is the business funnel system; increasing wealth with back-end sales instead of spending so much time with front-end efforts. It’s not a new concept; the way it is executed with the power of the Internet is just new.

So how can you as a business owner with a website and a dream start building wealth using the business funnel model?

Here are some ways you can do this and start making money with less effort:

The web-seminar. This is a new twist on an old idea. The Internet is full of information just waiting to be found. Offer your website viewers the opportunity to review a free web seminar offered remotely via their computer or a phone in session (called a tele-seminar).

While holding the seminar, the host can offer free information and advice, allow callers to comment and the whole thing gets recorded for later promotion. At the conclusion of the seminar, offer participants the opportunity to attend a low-cost class or provide a deal for one of the services or products your company offers. If they like the information you present, they will be hooked and will keep coming back to learn more.

Offer affiliate opportunities. That’s right, you can build up a nice back-end income by allowing others to share in and promote your products and services with a small monetary incentive as their reward. Affiliate programs are becoming wildly popular ways to make more back end sales with minimal efforts on your behalf. It’s basically a low cost alternative to advertising and offers endless networking opportunities. Just think for every website visitor you get, each person may know hundreds of other people who may be interested in what your company can do for them. It’s a new concept based on word-of-mouth advertising that offers great potential for anyone who taps into this.

Have an action plan. Just as any organization would include a plan for growth and sales, your business needs to come up with a plan to add back end products to the existing offerings. For example, if you offer products for home building, you may also want to offer financing or consulting as some additional services. You can affiliate yourself with other companies who will provide these services and then make an income from their efforts, just for referring customers their way.

Be accountable. Each person in your company should be responsible for the success of the growth and wealth building, even if it’s just you. That means following up on every possible lead that may introduce you to other sources of income. That means measuring everyone’s success to determine what’s working and eliminate things that aren’t. It is recommended that your business spend at least an hour everyday seeking out other residual forms of income to build your back-end of the funnel.

With just a few simple methods, your business can earn a substantial amount of income by building up back end sales. Using the business funnel system is a great way to increase the chances that you will be earning more money with less effort.

To Your Success!

Warm Regards,
Jeremy Gislason
Follow us on Twitter at:
http://twitter.com/SureFireWealth

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

The most common types of entities are:

• Sole Proprietorship – This is the simplest form of business organization, where the business effectively operates as an extension of the owner.

• General Partnership – This is a relatively simple way for two or more partners to own and control the operations of the business.

• Limited Partnership – This form of business organization is similar to a General Partnership, except that all but one of the partners can limit their personal liabilities if something goes wrong in the business.

• Limited Liability Company – This form of business entity provides limited liability to all of its members, and the members have more flexibility (compared to general partnerships and limited partnerships) in how they want to allocate the profits and losses of the business.

• Corporation – This well-known entity is a common way for businesses to organize themselves.  The corporation is considered to be a separate legal “person” under the law, so it is taxed on all corporate income.  Any amounts paid to shareholders as dividends are also taxed to those shareholders.

The summary above is very much simplified, so you should do more research on each of these types of entity, and the suitability of each for your business.  In doing so, here are several key things you should consider:

Timing Issues

How soon do you plan to start your business?  It is generally very easy to organize your business as a sole proprietorship, and you will spend less time preparing and filing paperwork than with the other types of business entities.  Forming a corporation can be noticeably more difficult than forming the other types of entities.

Thankfully, most states have made the formation process much easier for all types of business entities, by permitting applicants to file their initial paperwork and yearly reports online.

Ownership Issues

Will you own the business yourself, or with other?  Certain business structures more easily accommodate more than a single owner, and limited liability companies are very flexible in their ownership structures.  Different types of corporations (such the “subchapter S” corporation, which is similar to a limited liability company in tax treatment) have limitations on the number and type of permissible owners (such as that the owners must be individual persons, not other corporations).

Also keep in mind when you are preparing your organizational documents that you should consider what you want to happen if one of the owners wants to leave the business.  It may be uncomfortable (and seem unnecessary) to think about this at the beginning of the business, but it can save a lot of stress and expense if these issues are worked out beforehand.

Financing Issues

How do you intend to finance the growth of your business – do you anticipate seeking outside investment?  If so, what kinds of investors will you target?  Different types of business entities are better suited to different types of investors.

For example, limited liability companies can easily be structured to accommodate many different types of investors.  Not surprisingly, corporations are often the investment vehicle of choice for large and institutional investors.

Expenses

In general, the simpler legal structures are less expensive to form, and require less money to maintain.  For example, depending on its capital structure, a corporation formed under the laws of Delaware could be required to pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in so-called franchise taxes.  These extreme situations apply to corporations that are extremely large, but they illustrate how you need to factor these considerations into your business planning.

Recordkeeping Requirements

You may also wish to consider the various recordkeeping requirements that are applicable to each type of business entity.  You’ll need proper accounting records regardless of the type of your business entity, but the additional legal recordkeeping requirements can vary.  For example, corporations have relatively stringent recordkeeping rules (compared to other entity types), and also have shareholder and annual meeting requirements.

Liability Concerns

Depending on the nature of your business, you may need to give liability issues extra consideration.  If you’ll have employees making deliveries or otherwise driving on company business, then it’s not hard to imagine a traffic accident occurring, and this could expose your business to lawsuits.
A sole proprietorship does not protect the personal assets of the owner.  This means that if there is a successful lawsuit against your business, the suing party can use your personal assets (like your car, your savings account, and your house) to satisfy their claim.  The general partners of a general partnership have similar exposure.

The limited partners of a limited partnership, the members of a limited liability company and the shareholders of a corporation are all generally insulated from personal liability.  However, certain legal formalities must be observed, otherwise a court can “pierce the veil” of the legal entity and disregard the liability protections that would otherwise apply.

Tax Matters

Different states have different tax laws and requirements, so you should consult your tax or accounting advisor to learn more about exactly what to expect in your state.  In general, in a sole proprietorship the profits and losses of the businesses will pass through to the owner’s individual tax return.  This avoids the additional layer of taxation that occurs at the corporation level.  Similarly, the limited liability company structure does not incur taxation at the company level; the tax on income occurs at the level of the individual members occurs only on income that is distributed to them.

These are just some of the issues that you’ll need to consider when you decide which type of business entity is the best fit for your needs.  Take the time to think about what you’ll need, and you’ll likely end up saving yourself a lot more time (and money) in the long run. For more information on setting up your business and protecting your assets go to: ProtectYourOnlineAssets.com

To Your Success!

Warm Regards,
Jeremy Gislason
Follow us on Twitter at:
http://twitter.com/SureFireWealth

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

All of those things are fantastic pros to owning your own business and working from home.  However, there is a dark side.  There is the tendency to get sidetracked from the work that generates a profit and puts food on your table to the work you would maybe rather do at the moment like build that deck in your back yard, work on your car, or ugh…do the laundry.

There is also the tendency to lose track of time researching for your business or taking care of tasks that may be better suited for a different time or even handled by a different person.  All of these sidetracks, and many more, will take away from your daily productivity and essentially end up affecting your bottom line.

Here are 10 tips to help you stay on track and heading toward the profits you desire and deserve.

1. Organize everything.  Having a system in place for your business, your home office, and your work time is essential to remain focused and productive.  Develop a system of organizing your office files and your computer files.  Make sure there is a place for everything including the stuff you got in the mail today.  Some common file categories are:

• Expenses
• Bank accounts
• Receipts
• Customer files
• Contracts
• Payables
• Receivables
• Taxes
• Business entity documentation
• Marketing
• Copywriting ideas

On your computer it is often helpful to have a folder for every major aspect of your business with separate smaller folders contained inside if necessary.  For example you could have a taxes folder on your computer with separate tax information stored in sub folders by date.  Al l the tax information and documentation for each year would be stored in that year’s folder.  The important thing to remember when developing a system of organization is to make sure that it is a system that will work for you, your business, lifestyle and needs.  If it doesn’t you wont use it and it won’t do you any good.

2. Plan.  Some people are planners and others are doers.  To be a successful business owner, you have to be both.  You have to plan it and then you have to do it.  Plan your business, plan your year, plan your month, plan your week, plan your day.  Task lists and project management systems are great tools for the day to day, month to month type planning.  For longer range annual planning you will want to go back to your business plan and review, revise, and reassess it annually.

Goals are much easier achieved if you set out a plan to achieve them.  This includes the small daily goals like calling that contact about that new joint venture idea you have.  I’m sure you have already heard this, but good goals are measurable, relevant, timely, and attainable.

3. To do lists.  To do lists or task lists as we talked about in #2 are essential to keep you on task and focused on your goal. Task lists also help keep you organized and they help you prioritize your day.  If you’re like me, then they help to motivate you too.  There’s something satisfying about crossing an item off of your task list, and conversely something terrifying about watching that task list grow and grow while doing nothing to shorten it and keep it under control.

4. Automate what you can.  One of the fantastic things about working from home and owning an online business is that there are so many wonderful tools available to help make our lives easier.  There are autoresponders and electronic shopping carts.  Web tracking statistics and article submission software programs.  Heck, there are even task list programs that will email you your task list for the day!  Automating certain tasks will help take the burden off of your shoulders and free up your time to spend on more important tasks.

5. Keep real hours.  One of the pitfalls of working from home is the tendency to work 12 hours a day.  I know you’re thinking no way, I wouldn’t do that, but it happens and your friends, family, and even your pets suffer the consequences.  You do too.  All work and no play makes ….well you know the rest.  Even if you LOVE your job, it is important to step away from it.  Keep real hours. 9-5, 8-4, 10-6 it doesn’t matter. Do whatever works best for you and your business but when it comes time to clock out and eat dinner with your family – do it.  Work isn’t going anywhere but your family is.

6. Let it go.  This goes back to #5.  When the horn blows and it’s time to turn off the computer and go to your child’s choir concert, be there with them in the moment.  If your mind is at home thinking about the task you didn’t quite finish or the project you’re starting tomorrow, you’re not truly with your child.

7. Track your hours.  Tracking the hours you work and the time it takes to accomplish certain tasks can be an eye opening experience.  You may find that the copywriting you think is only taking you an hour a day is actually taking you two.  You may also find that your administrative tasks are taking significantly less time than you thought they were or that answering emails consumes half of your day.  Tracking your time is essential if you want to later determine the value of it.

8. Plan your admin time.  Use the time of day that you are most productive for the tasks that are important to your business.  You can easily handle your administrative tasks during the time of the day when you’re unable to focus as well or are likely to have more interruptions.

9. Outsource what you can.  Since there are only 24 hours in a day and 5 days in a working week, it may not be possible to get everything done.  If you can fit it into your budget to outsource some of the more time consuming, and less appealing tasks, it may be worth your while to do so.  Particularly if your time would be better spent on tasks that generate revenue.

10. Identify your time stealers.  Everyone has time stealers.  Some get easily distracted by email.  Others find themselves spending too much time networking online or researching.  You likely know what your time stealers are.  If you don’t track what you do during the workday and how much time you spend doing it.  The results will be interesting.

Once you know where you’re losing time, you can take measures to eliminate it.  For example, if email is stealing your time, schedule checking your email into your task list in the morning, at lunch and near the end of the day.  That way you’re not responding to every new email in your inbox. 

Working from home is a joy but it takes a bit of structure and discipline if you want to be productive.  Using these ten tips as guidelines, you’ll be well on your way to a productive, and profitable future.

To Your Success!

Warm Regards,
Jeremy Gislason
Follow us on Twitter at:
http://twitter.com/SureFireWealth

Bookmark It

Hide Sites