Interesting that this guy recognizes that you can make money online but doesn't want to! If you want to, give me your details at the top left and take a look at the free videos to see if it might be for you.

Tony

"Mom told me that her friend said that you can make money online. Well, of course you can. People are doing it all the time. I guess I just feel like I do not have the time for this. I just want to make sure that my mother understand that I have a full time job, and I do not want to bother with setting things up. I know that people who can bother with it will earn a lot of money because they are willing to make the effort. However, this is not something that I am interested in doing for myself at all. It is not like it isn’t a good idea. It really is a good way to earn income. However, I just do not feel like it is for me. Perhaps if she wants to get started on her own, she can. This is just not something that I see myself doing for awhile"

Building Multiple Streams of Income

With acknowledgements to the "Saving Money Today" blog

Ever since my wife quit her job to stay home and raise our kids I’ve been on a quest to create as many streams of income as possible.  I currently have this blog and a small portfolio of web sites that earn me a nice little side income.

In addition to the obvious benefit of extra income, my online efforts offer us some protection by diversifying our income sources.  While my online income can’t replace the salary I receive at my full-time job (not yet anyway!) it would buy us some extra time and breathing room if I were to lose my job.

If you haven’t already started building multiple streams of income for yourself, perhaps it’s time you started.    Take baby steps and add one small income stream at a time.   And keep reminding yourself that as you build those income streams they will slowly join together to form a raging river!

Ideas For Building Multiple Streams of Income

Working part-time at a second job is probably the first idea people have when brainstorming ways to make extra money.   You can also earn extra money by pet sitting, mowing lawns, delivering newspapers, or doing odd jobs around the neighborhood.

The downside to these methods is that your earning potential is limited to the number of hours you can work.  If you’re too tired, sick, or just plain busy to deliver papers or mow lawns…you don’t get paid.

I prefer to search for more passive income ideas.  Enter the internet.

I launched my first web site back in 2004.  It was nothing fancy, just a small static site consisting of about a dozen pages about wine.  Right now that site is  averaging about $2 a day in Google AdSense revenue.  That may not sound like much, but that’s for a site that I have barely touched in years and do almost nothing to promote.

I have other sites too in addition to this blog and they are online 24 hours a day, 365 days a week.  Even if I’m sleeping or away on vacation, they are running and making me money.  That’s about as close to passive income as you can get.

Have you ever considered launching your own website to make extra money?  Why not?

You’d probably be surprised how easy it is to get started, and it requires almost no start up costs.  You can get your own domain and web hosting package for about $100 a year.

Now don’t get me wrong.  Making money online does take hard work and patience.  Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.

But, the beauty of the internet is that once you go through the initial effort of setting everything up, it can be relatively easy to maintain.

Passive Income Tips. Develop Passive Income

Thanks and acknowledgments to "Passive Income Pro" . 

"The More Your Know, the Faster It Will Grow!!" What will grow faster if you know more about it? Well, a number of things, but here we are only interested in one, the creation of passive streams of income.That's what these passive income tips are here for.

The reason why most people do not earn any automatic income, the reason they all work hard never get ahead, is because they do not know what passive income is, how it is made, and how they can get started. Before anyone can create multiple streams of passive income they must have a pretty keen understanding of how it is done. That is why I am hoping the passive income tips on this page will give you a boost in Passive Income I.Q. and help you get closer to your financial freedom goals.


Passive Income Tips...

Know Exactly How Much You Need Financial Freedom
Financial freedom is a state of living where you have enough money coming in to pay for your desired lifestyle, all without having to work. When you have enough passive income to cover your cost of living, you are completely financially free. How much passive income would it take to set you free? How much income would you ultimately enjoy having each month to spend? Goals give power to our actions, and knowing your goal for automatic income will give you the power to create the life you want.

Choose the Best Path
There are infinite possibilities when it comes to developing passive income, but they all fall into one of two categories, Business vs Investing Income. Which is best for you? Well, it depends on a number of things including your skills, experiences, abilities, your unique interests, as well as your starting capital. Investing can require a lot of upfront capital before substantial profits can be made, which makes the business route more accessible to a wider range of people.

Choose Your Vehicles Wisely
Once you decide to tackle one of the main areas of passive income, you need to choose individual income vehicles. Once again, you will want to assess yourself and choose the income opportunities that are best suited for your goals and capabilities, as well as your interests and passions. Take time to investigate possible opportunities before jumping in head first.

Invest Time in Mastery
Depending on the methods that you choose to develop passive income, you may or may not need to invest money. However, in either case you should plan on spending time to master the income streams that you have chosen. If you are going to build a free passive income business from scratch, you will obviously need to invest a lot of time building and growing your business income. And if you choose to invest for automatic income, you will want to take time to invest in your knowledge and application of proven investment principles.

Make Passive Income Building a Regular Habit
If you think that you can get started today and create financial freedom within a few weeks, you are not going to make it very far. It takes time, often several months or even years before real earnings will be seen on a regular basis. Take your financial goals seriously, and make a habit out of working toward them. Individuals who commit to spending time each day to develop passive income create lifetimes of unlimited wealth.

Diversify and Grow
Mastering a single income vehicle can give you everything you need for freedom, but as you may find out for yourself, building wealth can be a fun and exciting journey, and you may find yourself reevaluating your goals and setting them even higher. The great thing about automatic income is that it works in its own, so you can create multiple income streams without having to use up all of your time. Diversify into a number of money streams and grow a powerful, long term income.

Look Toward the Internet
Over the past few years I have used many avenues to develop passive income, but now I look almost solely to the internet for new and exciting ways to make money on autopilot. My favorite sources of income are my websites. A website can make money 24 hours a day, and with simple software like the Site Build It! website builder, you can effortlessly build a winning money generating website with no previous experience.


I hope you have enjoyed these passive income tips. You can successfully develop passive income, it just take patience, persistence, and attention. And while I will be the first one to forewarn you that a lot of work may be involved, especially if you do not already have a lot of money to invest and therefore need to invest your time and energy.

But I will also be the first to tell you just how exciting and rewarding it can be to begin creating multiple streams of income that earn you money around the clock. Begin now to plant seeds of automatic income and watch as your financial freedom begins to take flight.

NB: For five superb free videos as an intro to my "Pensions Boost" system for establishing your retirement income just enter your name and email address in the space at the top left of this blog.

After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring.
He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.

Will Rogers

How to Make Money Online (For Beginners)

 “I am trying to figure out where to start with internet marketing. I just read your post about lifestyle and I know the kind I want for my family, I just don’t know where to start…”

-Lynn Woolums Smith

Hi Lynn! I actually hear this question a lot, so you’re not alone. In fact there are 161 searches every day for “how to make money online for beginners” and more than 700/day for “how to make money online”…

There are a number of ways to make money online. Options range from creating your own product to sell online, making money as a professional blogger, managing an online community, developing a content site on a hot topic – just to name a few.

All of these are just various ways to deliver content online. Your first step will be choosing a niche, which is the market or topic you are going to focus on.

Speaking of focus, with so many options to make money online – focus is key. You want to choose a niche and a business model, and work on that one project all the way from start to profit. Don’t let all the other options distract or derail you.

Once you decide on a topic or niche, you should sit down and map out a plan for your internet business model. What market are you targeting, and how can you best serve that market? This is the angle you want to work from, vs the more common: how can I make the most money from this market? (Most people get it backwards and then get frustrated when that doesn’t work out for them)

So you choose a niche, create a blog or website, set up social media profiles to interact with your target market on the topic, and you create and share useful content that will build your reputation and readership in that niche.

I can hear what you’re saying…

“That all sounds great, but how do I make money from it?”

How to Make Money Online (For Beginners)

The absolute easiest way to make money online is with Affiliate Marketing. You don’t have to create a product, set up a shopping cart and merchant account, do customer service, work with clients, etc. It’s very much like a traditional commission-based sales job where you earn commission on any sales you refer.

The difference is that you’re doing it online, and you can do it from home without ever doing in-person or phone sales. You simply recommend products and/or refer people to specific merchants through the content on your website.

The method I prefer is creating SEO Content, or content that is optimized to rank well in the major search engines. People find it when they are searching for that, click through, and buy what they need or want. This works really well because you write the content once, and it continues to rank well and earn you money for years to come. As long as you maintain your search engine rankings.

“How can I make 3-4k a month or more? What steps will it take to get there?”

I know this is stating the obvious, but it should be said: It takes time, work, and being both persistent and consistent. An online business is the same as any other business in that it requires an investment on your part to get it up and running. The positive side of online business is that it takes a lot less time and money than most traditional offline business models.

Do these 10 steps, in this order, to get started:

Choose Your Niche

Register a Domain Name

Set up a Website or WordPress Blog

Set up a Facebook Page and Twitter account

Download and read SEO Fast Start (free)

Create Optimized Content for your Site/Blog

Sign up for Affiliate Programs in your niche

Write Product Reviews for those products

Get links pointing to your pages or posts

Continue creating content, getting links & interacting via Social Media

Once you get all this set up and you’re making money as an Affiliate, you can look at other ways to monetize your site. You might create short reports on your topic to sell, test contextual advertising, or look into even more methods to make money.

Yes it’s work. And yes – it’s worth it!

If you do these steps, and continue to learn & tweak as you go, you’ll start earning money. You can increase your traffic (number of visitors) and your income as you continue to grow and market your website. It takes time to get to a consistent $3-5K per month in revenue, but you could easily do that within the first year.

Best,

p.s. Lynn was referring to my Lifestyle & Income of a Super Affiliate post. Give that a read if you haven’t already as it will give you a sneak peek into my life and success doing the exact things I outlined here. If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a comment below.

When Somebody says Something's Impossible, How Do They Know

Judging from the way people talk, pretty much everything is apparently impossible to achieve.  I’m confident Columbus’s quest to reach the East Indies via the western route was regarded as impossible by most.  I’m equally confident that not even 200 years ago practically everybody believed flight to be impossible.  In short, pretty much everything awesome anybody has ever done has been called impossible.

Theoretically, one could try to find out whether or not something is impossible by applying scientific principles and mathematical formulas to the problem at hand.  If, after being able to rule out all possible scenarios, you discover something is either physically, biologically, or mentally impossible, you have your answer.
But it doesn’t work that way in real life.  It’s nearly impossible to actually prove something is impossible (ironically enough).  Just because you can’t figure out how to do something doesn’t mean it’s not possible, it just means you don’t know how to do it yet.  It’s very easy, on the other hand, to prove something is possible:  just do it! 

People have a tendency to believe something is impossible merely because they don’t know how to do it.  They’ve never actually tried, of course; they just can’t figure out how to do it.  So it must not be possible, naturally.

For example, many people would say it’s impossible to earn a significant income on the internet, but I’ve managed to do it and so have many others.  Still more would say it’s impossible to become wealthy without winning the lottery (a very common belief among low-income workers), but thousands manage it every year.  As it turns out, impossible is pretty easy, namely because most things people consider “impossible” are merely things they never bothered to try themselves.

So the next time somebody advises you not to do something because it’s “too hard” and “you’ll never succeed,” ask them how they know.  Have they tried it?  If not, it’s probably fine to ignore their advice.

Is passive income possible?

Passive income is the idea for many people. It sounds great doesn’t it, to earn money with no effort really, just sit on the beach and watch the sunset. For income to be truly passive you need to not have worked for it, so if you inherited a bunch of shares and received dividends or something like that, that would be true passive income.

Most people’s idea of passive income is income which was worked for initially, then became passive. This is the passive income I am talking about in this post. Some think this is unachievable; others are just going for it. Me, I am going for it!

I have discussed passive income on here a little before, including my ideas and what I am doing. You can check my previous passive income posts here and here for ideas.
I want to know what you think.

One comment on one of those posts really resonated with me “No matter how much money you make, if you are a slave to money, I would still consider that as being poor.” – Mike from Adstalker. I totally agree, which is why creating streams of income, particularly passive income is so important to me.

I think it is possible, but I know so many people who do not.
Why do I think it is possible?
Because I know people who are doing it!
I know people who own businesses and barely have to do a thing with it. They run themselves, which is how a good business should be. They get the profits, and hardly have to work. It took a long time to get to that point and yes, there are issues every now and then that need to be dealt with, but on the whole, it is a relatively passive form of income now.

I know others who have written books and still collect the royalties’ years later. You need a really good book for this, but it is possible.
I know landlords who own enough homes to live more than comfortably. They selected them, and then go agents to manage them and they hardly have a problem. Yes, there have been times where repairs need to be made, or problem tenants, but the pros have far outweighed the cons.

Passive income is possible. A lot of the time the issue is the work needed beforehand to create the stream of passive income that puts people off. Putting in the hard yards before reaping the benefits can seem like to much work.

I am at the stage where I have been putting in a lot of work and things are starting to pay off. I have a long way to go, but I have a couple of small passive income streams which I plan on growing and other income streams which are not passive, but the money I make through them will be invested to create other streams of passive income.

What are your thoughts – is passive income (the type you work for first and turn it passive, or almost) achievable or even realistic?

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Kylie

A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.
Ellen Glasgow

Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.

How to Make Money from Hobbies

Here are a few ways you can make money from hobbies.

Sell Hobby-Related Products

This is the route I took with my scrap-booking hobby. In fact, I was so enamored with scrap-booking, that I began the business at the same time I started the hobby.

I went the direct sales route, but — thanks to the internet — there are now many avenues for selling hobby-related products. EBay, Craigslist, and Etsy are just a few possibilities.

In fact – if you’re looking for a good selling niche for the internet – hobby related products are one of the best. Passionate hobbyists are known for wanting to collect anything and everything to do with their passion. So finding a way to source inventory and sell to them is a viable business option.

Work for a Business Related to Your Hobby

My husband is fond of saying that when he retires he wants to work as a marshal on a golf course. Since I’m not a golfer, I had to look up what a marshal does. About.com defines it this way:

A person whose job it is to patrol a golf course, keeping the pace of play up and responding to golfers’ questions or concerns.

Marshals are mostly volunteers, meaning they don’t get paid or get paid only in free golf. But someone who is into golf and wants to earn some money while being around the sport could look for a paying job in a pro shop or at a golf store.

In fact — no matter what your hobby — there is probably a business where you could share your expertise by helping customers, and get paid to do it. You probably pass places like bike stores, garden centers, bakeries, and craft stores when you’re out and about. All of these businesses either cater to hobbyists or employ people who are passionate about what they do. In fact, those people tend to make the best customer service people because they know so much about their subject matter.

Teach Others about Your Hobby

I have a community college near my house and twice each year I get a continuing education catalog full of non-credit classes that members of the community can take. There are always a number of hobby-related classes, which tells me that people are eager to learn about their hobbies.

Here are just a few from the most recent catalog:

• Knitting
• Drawing
• Calligraphy
• Painting
• Jewelry making
• Ballroom dancing
• Cooking
• Investing
• Photography
• Writing
• Music lessons

If you’ve been at your hobby for a while and have a lot of knowledge about it, there are probably people who will pay you to teach them about it. You could check out community colleges and extension offices to see if they’re looking for instructors. Or, if you’re willing to market, you could go it alone and offer your own classes or even private instruction.

 Julie Mayfield.

Non-Taxing Tax Quotes

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.

Mark Twain

Passive Income Myths & Misconceptions

We would all love to attain a position where we have created an ongoing income that continues without us constantly having to work for it. 

Copious amounts of online ads take advantage of this by offering the promise of effortless ongoing income

The elementary step in developing a long-lasting passive income is to expel some of the myths concerned. 

Here are some of the most common myths about creating a passive online income:

One: Construct a Website, Sit Back & Watch the Cheques Roll in.

Valuable advice from those who have run internet businesses: 

Generating a good living on the Internet requires marketing, customer service and order fulfilment. Either you do it yourself or you need to hire somebody to do it. Whichever way, owning a website and selling your own merchandise is often a considerable contrast to the "lying on the beach while collecting your cheques" appearance.

Two: MLM- Networking Income is Residual Income.

Almost all of the time, a part of the sales pitch in networking is "creating residual income." Although it's possible with MLM, it's exceedingly difficult to maintain. This is why...   

MLM income is built on 3 basic factors: New purchases by retail consumers, the recruitment of new wholesale consumers and the continued purchasing by both groups. To have a continuing "residual" income, you must recruit, train and motivate a significant number of leaders who will then continue the procedure in expanding numbers.

However, often enough, this is not the case.

Instead, top leaders discovered it to be easier to compose a large list of MLM "junkies" who they then take into one program after another. If you stopped joining new programs, you would also diminish your income within just a few months.

Three: Simply Build Your Business & Hire People to Run it for you.

This could work, but often enough it is more of a nightmare than a dream.

Unless you have an adequate amount employees & profits to hire top quality managers, employees are an ongoing headache. If you do manage to build a large enough, profitable enough, business, and if you have the correct nature and personality, then building your business and hiring people to run it is a great idea.

Four: Developing a Passive Income is Simple.

Do not fall for this one, either.

Development of a passive income will take a great amount of stamina. The steps to getting it done aren't hard, but it requires one thing a lot of people won't apply - consistency. If someone does the right thing, day after day, they'll create an ongoing and growing income. If they try today, one day next week, then one day one month later, they will probably never succeed in getting there.

Development of a passive, ongoing, income is worth it. Avoid trusting in these 4 altered realities, be prepared to work and you can achieve an additional income in no time at all. Maintain it long enough and finally, you can retire.

I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

John D. Rockefeller

Massive Passive Income: Does Autoblogging Really Work?

 Autoblogging is quite a hot topic these days in t Internet Marketing social circles. In case you have not heard all of the recent buzz and are scratching your head about what autoblogging is, it's a method for creating blogs in a ?set it and forget it' kind of way that have plugins in place to automatically post content daily. This essentially takes much of the labor out of creating unique content and posting daily or even every few days. But, the question of the moment is, does autoblogging work? Can you really generate a ton of passive income just from setting up these little niche blogs and then leaving them to fend for themselves? Here are some things that you might hear about autoblogging:

Autoblogging is nothing but a scam Most likely written either by folks who have tried it and failed, or who simply dismiss the concept out-of-hand because they firmly believe that the only way to blog is by creating unique content daily.

Autoblogging is your gateway to untold Internet Marketing riches At the other end of the spectrum you might hear claims that autoblogging is your ticket to riches and fame. Those messages are most often promulgated by those who are selling an autoblogging product.
The truth about autoblogging lies somewhere in between the idea that autoblogging is a black hat scam, and the idea that you can auto-blog your way to untold wealth. 

With autoblogging you use automated plugins that grab content based on your keywords from RSS feeds, article directories, your own stash of PLR content, and videos. You aggregate all of this content and present it under your chosen category along with adverts that would appeal to the particular audience that you are targeting with your content.

You also need the tools and technology to make setting up and maintaining multiple blogs simple and straightforward. Wordpress is the perfect platform for your auto-blogs because it allows you to host multiple, individual blogs with their own domain names on a single installation of the Wordpress software on your server.

Autoblogging has many moving parts, so it's good to have a proven system to follow to help ensure your chances for success. Trying to patch together a solution and work through trial and error on your own can cost you valuable time and money.

If you follow a proven system and if you are willing to invest some time, thought and strategy on the front end, you can set up an empire of auto-blogs that will generate a healthy stream of passive income for you. If you are serious about getting started building your own autoblogging empire, you must check out Massive Passive Profits, which is a mass deploy autoblogging format that completely automates the creation of Wordpress multi-user blog and feeds them with tons of content.

Author:  Thomas Varughese  courtesy of Amazines.com

http://Thomaskadakkethu.com.

The Path Most Often Taken to Passive Income

It seems that the most common path to generating large passive income streams is to work at a primary job and use your actively earned income to buy assets that generate passive income on a regular basis. The doctor or lawyer could use his income to invest in a medical start-up or buy shares of medical companies he understands such as Johnson & Johnson. Over time, the nature of compounding, dollar cost averaging, and reinvesting dividends will result in his portfolio generating substantial passive income. The downside is that it can take decades to achieve enough to truly improve your standard of living but it is still the surest way to wealth based on the historical performance of business ownership and stocks.

Taxes and Passive Income 
A major advantage of earning passive income in the United States is that it is often taxed more favorably than active income. That may seem unfair, but the idea is that it will give people an incentive to invest in assets that will grow the economy and create jobs. A business owner that works in his company, for instance, would have to pay an extra 15.3% in self-employment payroll taxes compare to someone who merely had a passive interest in the same limited liability company who would pay only income taxes. In other words, the same income earned actively would be taxed at a higher rate than if it were earned passively. f lower taxes and control over your time aren’t incentive to prefer passive income over active income, I don’t know what is.

The easiest way to gain financial independence is to reconfigure your life so that a substantial portion of your income is not actively earned by your labor. Instead, it must come from passive income. In fact, the idea of passive income is closely related to the Berkshire Hathaway model, which I explain in an earlier feature. The basic idea of passive income is that it is money received with little or no effort required to maintain the flow of income once the initial work has been done. Some common examples of passive income are:

    •    Rent from real estate properties
    •    Patent royalties for an invention
    •    Trademark licensing fees for characters or brands you’ve created
    •    Royalties from books, songs, publications, or other original works
    •    Profits from businesses in which you have little or no day-to-day role or responsibility
    •    Earnings from Internet advertisements in a blog or on a website you own
    •    Dividends from stocks, REITs, equity mutual funds, or other equity securities
    •    Interest from owning bonds, certificates of deposit, other other cash and cash equivalents
    •    Pensions
    •    Residual income for a sales person on accounts that are typically renewed automatically such as a sporting goods representative that earns a commission on his accounts, bringing in a few thousand dollars per store per year for servicing the customers once they have been opened

Why You Should Prefer Passive Income to Active Income.


Passive income is attractive because it frees you to spend your time on the things you actually enjoy. A highly successful doctor, lawyer, or publicist, for instance, cannot “inventory” their profits in the words of one well known author. If they want to earn the same amount of money and enjoy the same lifestyle next year  and the year after that, they must continue to work the same number of hours at the same pay rate. Although such a career can provide a fantastic life, it requires far too much sacrifice unless you truly enjoy the daily grind of your chosen profession. Even worse, once you desire to retire, or find yourself unable to work any longer, your income will cease to exist unless you have some form of passive income. In the past, this was accomplished by employee participation in company-sponsored pension plans.

The Two Broad Types of Passive Income 
There are two types of passive income and throughout your career, which ones you focus on will likely depend upon your current financial situation, talents, skills, and personality. The two categories of passive income are:

    1.    Passive income sources that require capital to start, maintain and grow
    2.    Passive income sources that do not require capital to start, maintain, and grow

Those who choose to focus on the first category of passive income will need either family money, funds from investors, or the nerve to borrow large sums by taking on debt to fund the purchase of assets. The easiest to understand is someone who takes out substantial bank loans to build an apartment building or buy rental houses. Although this can turn a very small amount of equity into a large cash flow stream, it is not without risk. When using borrowed money, the margin of safety is much smaller because you can’t absorb the same degree of setback before defaulting and finding your balance sheet obliterated.

Another example of the first category of passive income is someone who has an ownership stake in an operating business such as a factory or furniture store and allows the business to issue debt to fund expansion. The early store managers in Wal-Mart who were allowed to invest before the company went public were in this position.

Large investment portfolios also fall into this category of passive income. If you owned $10,000,000 worth of blue chip stocks, you could reasonably expect dividends of $500,000 per year. Whether or not you spend your days playing golf, painting, or writing the great American novel, you would collect checks as those businesses paid out a portion of their earnings. The problem, of course, is that it takes the ten million to be in that position.

The second category of passive income - that is, passive income sources that do not require capital to start, maintain, and grow - are far better choices for those who want to start out on their own and build a fortune from nothing. They include assets you can create, such as a book, song, patent, trademark, Internet site, recurring commissions, or businesses that earn nearly infinite returns on equity such as a drop-ship ecommerce retailer that has little or no money tied up in operations but still earns profits for the owner.

By Joshua Kennon, About.com Guide

Two Work-From-Home Danger Zones And How To Beat Them Back

True confessions. A few days a week, I go to work in my pajamas. Being a member of the estimated 30 million U.S. workers who ply their trade from home at least once a week, I'm just not required to don my business casual clothing on a daily basis.

However, lately I've begun to consider that, despite the obvious comfort and convenience of flannel, my robe as business-wear might not be the best for my productivity.
Pondering my pj situation got me wondering about what other non-productive work-from-home habits other small business owners might be struggling with.

To find out, I queried and got responses from over 150 small business proprietors, including CPAs, consultants, Web workers, marketing experts, writers, artists and others. While there were dozens of issues brought up, there were a few that stood out. Here are the two most common work-from-home danger zones and some best practices for beating them back.

#1 Danger Zone: Getting distracted by personal items during work time.
Stopping cold in the middle of writing a critical client proposal to meet with the plumber; cleaning out the kitchen cabinets instead of making marketing calls; surfing the net for the newest smartphone apps rather than following up with potential clients. The natural distractions of personal items are all around us when we work at home. While it may not be possible to ignore every home issue that arises, setting clear boundaries around work time is essential to being productive.

Best Practice: Time blocking. The night before, or first thing in the morning, sit down and do an estimated time plan for the day. The time plan should include times to work on key projects and deliverables as well as client work, marketing and social media. If there are personal errands or tasks that need to be done that day, don't do them spontaneously. Instead, set aside a defined time window during the day to get them done. By creating a time plan, you're more likely to follow it and avoid getting taken off course by an unexpected interruption.

"I set some major time goals for how I want to divide up my workday," says Shel Horowitz, author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. Horowitz says he tries to spend set amounts of time each day on billable client hours, writing, email, social media, exercise and office and personal tasks. "Tracking my time has forced me to be much more conscious of what I do all day. I've had to look at the reality that email was swallowing three to four hours a day. Since, I've unsubscribed from about 60 newsletters."

#2 Danger Zone: Rolling out of bed and going straight into the office. I realized that I, like many of my self-employed brethren, had slipped into the bad habit of waking up and going straight onto email, then stopping at some point and eating breakfast, then maybe exercising -- maybe not. Almost all the respondents pointed out that having an inconsistent morning routine and, yes, going to work in pj's, was ultimately bad for their small business.

Best Practice: Institute a morning routine that includes putting on pants or any piece of clothing you haven't slept in. More than 90 percent of the small business owners I surveyed for this post mentioned that putting on real clothes was important to feeling their most productive when working from home.
"The biggest problem with wearing pajamas while working from home is a psychological one," says Andrew Schrage, editor at Money Crashers. "Most people associate pajamas with relaxing, watching TV, and sleep. Thus, pajamas can act as a never-ending temptation to stop working and just relax, which is one of the biggest challenges of working from home."

Schrage says that on the flip side, wearing real clothes puts you in more of an active, working mindset for getting things done.

The other factor mentioned by almost every small business owner who responded was the importance of establishing a consistent morning routine.
"The flexibility of working from home can sometimes alter your sense of urgency to get up and going by 9 a.m.," says Jaclyn Mullen. "But the more organized and structured you start off, the more likely you are to complete your projects on time and without errors."

Try creating a regular routine that includes the time you will get up, the time you will be at your desk and what you plan to do in between (eat breakfast, exercise, shower) and follow it for a week. Make adjustments as needed, but commit yourself to a path of morning rituals that will set you up for the most productive day possible.

What are your work-from-home danger zones? We would love to hear your comments.
This article originally appeared at Xero.com, online accounting software for small business.
Karen Leland is a freelance journalist, best-selling author and president of Sterling Marketing Group where she helps businesses negotiate the wired world of today's media landscape -- social and otherwise. For questions or comments, please contact her at kleland@scgtraining.com.

Passive Income How to Earn More and Work Less

Do you want to continue working 50, 70, 100 hours a week the rest of your life?

Good! Neither do I.

Do you want to be able to take time off whenever you want to, without worrying about what's going to happen to your business?

So do I!

There's a saying in the corporate world: "Don't make yourself irreplaceable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted." As an entrepreneur, this is still true in its own way. Let's think of "being promoted" as earning more and working less. You can raise your prices, but until you can remove yourself from being directly involved in doing the work that generates the income, there's always going to be a limit to how much you can earn, and it can only increase very slowly.

Passive income, on the other hand, is income that does not require your direct involvement. Some kinds of passive income you may be familiar with include owning rental property, royalties on an invention or creative work, and network marketing. If you want to earn more, work less, and have a decent retirement, you're going to have to start creating income streams that do not require your direct involvement. Whether you're just starting your business, or you've been running it a while, the sooner you start thinking about how you are going to shift your business model to create more passive income, the sooner you can achieve personal and financial freedom.

Let's look at two basic types of passive income, and a third type of income that, while technically not passive, is a key strategy for earning more and working less.

Residual Income

Residual income is revenue that occurs over time from work done one time. Some examples include:

• An insurance agent who gets commission every year when a customer renews his policy
• A network marketing or direct sales rep's income from her direct customers when they reorder product every month
• An aerobics instructor who produces a video and sells it at the gyms where she teaches
• A marketing consultant who creates a workbook and sells it in e-book format on the Internet
• A photographer who makes his photos available through a stock photography clearinghouse and gets paid a royalty whenever someone buys one of his images
• A restaurant or retail owner who has grown to the point of hiring a trustworthy manager

As you can see, there are many different ways to generate residual income across a wide variety of businesses. It may be recurring income from the same customers, or the sales of a product to new customers. It may require no personal involvement whatsoever, such as an e-book sold on a web site, or it may require some personal interaction, such as the insurance agent calling the customer to remind them about their renewal and ask them if they want to change any of their coverage. Often, it's something that you can delegate to an assistant.

Note that this is different from merely recurring income. Recurring income may still require your involvement to earn the income, e.g., a coach or consultant on a monthly retainer, or a caterer who delivers lunch every Monday to the local school board. While this "active recurring income" offers welcome stability, it also tends to tie you down, and you still have limits on your earning capacity based on your own personal production capacity.

Leveraged Income

Leveraged income leverages the work of other people to create income for you. Some examples of leveraged income include:

• An e-book author selling her e-book through affiliates who promote the product
• A network marketer who builds a downline and receives commissions on the sales made by people in his downline
• A general contractor who makes a profit margin on the work done by sub-contractors
• Franchising your business model to other entrepreneurs (the ultimate leveraged income)
•  

Again, there are many different models in many different businesses. The key is that you are making money off of other people's labor, rather than primarily your own. Note that leveraged income may or may not also be residual income. When you combine them, that's even better.

Active Leveraged Income

This is a term I use to describe income that requires your direct participation, but that you can make more money by having more people involved. This generally involves a one-time event, such as:

• A seminar or class
• A conference or convention
• Concerts and dance recitals
• Raves and other parties

Although these require your direct participation, your earning potential is much higher than if someone were just paying you a direct hourly rate. Fill a room with 1,000 people paying $50 each and you can cover your facility cost, promotional cost, and staffing fees and still have a nice chunk of change left over.

Applying It

Now is the time to think about how to apply this in your business. Can you create a product that people will buy over and over again? Can you engage others to sell your product? How could you make money off the work of others?

The sooner you answer these questions, the sooner you'll have financial and personal freedom.

From Scott Allen, former About.com Guide

10 Online Business Ideas that Can Give You More Than 1000 Percent Return on Investment

Acknowledgements and Thanks to Noobpreneur.com

As you, Noobpreneur Business Blog readers and followers, might already knew, I threw myself into make money online arena about a year ago, with little knowledge of online money making methods, website or blog building, and Internet marketing.
I still learn hard today, even harder than I was one year ago, but during my online business trial-and-error journey, I found dozens of doable online business idea that you and I can start with minimum capital and maximum return.
10 online business ideas with more than 1000 percent return on investment
You can build an asset in the form of web properties and online businesses with minimal investment (some with zero, zit, zip, nada investment) that can make you 10 times or more of initial investment – either capital gain or monthly cash flow.
Yes, 1000% ROI – not only for capital gain when you sell your web properties, but also for monthly cash flow – that’s 10 times ROI monthly!
To get you started (and revved-up), here are my top 10 online business ideas from my observation and own experience:

    1.    Website or blog flipping business
Yes – just like in real estate, you can flip websites or blogs. The typical is to buy low, renovate, and sell high, but you can definitely go as a broker – you sell someone’s website to others and receive a commision: Wait, that’s even more than 10 times ROI! ;)
    2.    Website building business
The conventional – you build a website for a client with $10 in domain name, $50 in web hosting, your time and creativity. Your client could pay you anywhere from $200 to $2000. Um, yes $200 is not 10 times, but what if you host your client’s website in your own reseller account? Think about it…
    3.    Create a startup web business, sell it on online marketplace
Also the conventional, with a twist – you outsource to your partners for $30, sell your website or blog for $300.
    4.    Create an established web business, sell it on online marketplace
The classic money maker – Create a site with good concept, outsource to your partners, market the website, make some profit, and sell it for a higher sum of money. From the $30 case on #3 idea, you could even get more than $1000 if you delay gratification ;)
    5.    Web hosting reselling business
A bit saturated market, web hosting business is still offering something today. You can purchase a $25/month reseller hosting, such as HostGator, create hosting plans, that can give you 50 space to rent. Times that with $5, you will get $250/month – That’s 10 times operating cost, monthly.
    6.    Review sites
You can review almost about everything – web hosting, credit cards, health products,etc. – But first, you should join the available affiliate programs or networks to be able to market them. You should choose high-paying niche, such as web hosting and credit cards that could pay you more than $50 per lead, but beware of the stiff competition.
    7.    Content writing business
Content quality is more and more important today, as it can help your web business rank better, visited more and eventually make more money. Article writing can be outsourced for as low as $2, and be sold for $20 per article.
    8.    Membership sites
If you have relevant expertise in your niche, you should definitely think to build a membership site. It is basically a site that offer “insider information” or online training for paying members. A successful membership site can makes thousands of dollar a month with only a several hundreds of dollars in operating cost.
    9.    Blog network
This is not easy to do, but doing it right can make you considerable amount of money. Consider this – if you manage a 50 blogs network right and attract the right kind of advertising, you could easily make hundreds of dollar monthly cash flow, each blog.
    10.    Niche, even odd, sites
Selling bird cages online can make you thousands of dollars per month? You bet! A card collecting marketplace site can make thousands of dollar per month with only several hundreds of dollars operation cost? Sure! Going niche can make you successful business – just don’t go too far on the business idea :)

Organizing Your Online Business - 5 Tips To Help You Get Organized

If you are planning on becoming really successful with your home business you will need to think about how you are going to organize your online business.

There are many benefits to being an online business entrepreneur. You more than likely do not have to commute to work in streams of heavy traffic for a few hours. You can work when you like and how you like - or even in your pajamas if that is your preference! However, to be really successful with your online home business you will need to closely conform to one of the strategies that more conventional traditional businesses use - and that involves organizing your online business.
The reason you are building an online business is to make money - right? To make money you need to be operating profitably. To achieve profitability you need to be productive. The key to productivity is organization.

Here are some key tips to organize your online business

1. Organize Your Office/Work Area
Set up an area where you can work each day. Organize this work area so that you have all the items you require close at hand. You do not want to be going off searching for some item of stationery that you need. Try to save time in this way and it will add up over a period giving you more for productive tasks that make you money.

2. Plan Your Daily Schedule
You can easily waste time at the start of a new day by having to think about your strategy for achieving work products - so make a list the night before of what you intend to achieve. This means each day you can get going that much quicker.
As you complete each task on your list, tick it off. This will give you a feeling of achievement, and you can see just what progress you have made.

3. Take Regular Breaks From Your Desk
Most of us cannot concentrate for long intervals in one stretch - so it will help to take a break every hour or so. It will be beneficial to do something different for 10 minutes or so. As I am working at home, I use my ten minute breaks to do some of my household chores such as sorting the laundry, or dusting a room.
You will achieve more work product with a schedule of 4, one hour time blocks - than one solid four hour stretch of work.

4. Organize Your Business Finances To Be Separate From Your Personal Ones
It is a good idea to have separate credit/debit cards for your business and personal finances. It will make it easier to write up your accounts and save time as well. Pay off your credit cards each month, and manage your financial records with some system like Quickbooks or a spreadsheet based plan.

5. Set Up Filing Systems For All Of Your Online Business Information
In order to be efficient and productive you will need to be able to find the information you need quickly and easily. To locate that information you need to organize your online business with some tracking systems.

As online business owners we purchase products often. These might be in a variety of formats - audios, videos, pdf or whatever. Sometimes we make a purchase for a product based on a recommendation from a mentor or list we are subscribed to - then forget whether we actually downloaded the product or not. With so many download links we often cannot remember what the link was to access a product. All this type of information needs to be organized in a tracking system.

Again as online business owners you will be marketing maybe with articles, and need to be keeping a record of what articles you have written. These can be filed and tracked in a publications tracker of some sort or another. You need to keep a record of these articles so that they can be repurposed later on - i.e. in short reports or blog posts maybe.

In an online business there is a great deal of information that needs to be tracked and filed in a way that allows us to locate it in a second. This organization allows you to become efficient and therefore productive. Organize your online business for success and a peace of mind that will allow you to use that time more productively and to make you more money.


Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6417972

LIST BUILDING - H.A.R.O.

Not too many people have even heard of H.A.R.O., let alone know what it means. Do you? In my opinion this traffic getting , list building method for your Internet marketing isn’t for everyone but for some it could be an absolutely golden route to expedited list building.

The letters stand for “Help A Reporter Out” and the system dates back to a Facebook page some years ago where reporters advertised for contacts who could supply them with inside or professional information on  the subject  they were interested in. After registering to receive notifications of requirements in one or more of several categories, you would receive regular daily or twice daily emails advising of specific expertise, knowledge or experience that a particular journalist wanted to feature. The system became so popular that it has now been constituted into a website of its own and is considered a must by some online marketing aficionados.

On receiving email notice of a requirement in an area on which you had knowledge you would respond with a statement of your details and how you fit the requirement. If selected you could be featured in the media whether print, radio or other and by this means, gain an invaluable platform from which to publicise your online product or service.

If you feel that this method could be appropriate for you, check out the H.A.R.O. website, http://helpareporter.com  See the extract below.

SOURCES

No such thing as free PR?

From The New York Times, to ABC News, to HuffingtonPost.com and everyone in between, nearly 30,000 members of the media have quoted HARO sources in their stories. Everyone’s an expert at something. Sharing your expertise may land you that big media opportunity you’ve been looking for.

LIST BUILDING - E MAIL SIGNATURES

A hugely under-estimated but free and powerful technique for promoting your business or website and building your passive income, an e-mail signature is simply a message of some kind which is automatically inserted below your normal sign-off at the end of every email you send.

Consider how many emails you send every day. In all probability you under-estimate the number. In this day and age of electronic communication the ability to communicate by e-mail has become so common, so automatic that we hardly think about it any more but every single one we send is an opportunity to market our business.

This is one of the simplest means available to every single one of us. I will give the example of the ever popular Outlook mail client system in which you simply click on ‘Tools’ then ‘Options’, ‘Mail Format’ and finally ‘Signatures’. This opens up effectively a simple word editor into which you can insert a hyper-link to your site and, if you wish, an image or logo as well.

So many people will see your signature and inevitably some will click on it, even if only from curiosity and the signature will have done its job. Over time this simple method can generate many leads and is therefore a method of marketing which it would be wasteful to ignore. It is the epitome of a passive income generator.

LIST BUILDING - Article Directories

As explained in “The Exciting Business of Building a List”, the most deservedly popular method of marketing online has at its heart, the accumulation of a list or lists of the names and email addresses of contacts. These are people who have previously expressed an interest in a product of yours and who have also, usually confirmed that they are happy to receive future mailings from you. Such mailings can be the basis for your truly passive source of income.

How to go about building your list or lists (Separate lists for different areas of interest or ‘Niches’) is the subject of numerous articles, blogs, books and other writings which proliferate on the internet. I make no apology though for adding to this profusion because the subject is in a constant state of flux and the conventional wisdom of last month may well be ‘old hat’ by now or is at least likely to have been subject to the continuous process of gradual change.

There are several approaches to the search for new ‘sign ups’ which have to be paid for but which are usually justified by the idea that however much is spent in this way, far more will be earned as a result of the expenditure. These however are not the subject of this article or its planned successors. Far more interesting and exciting to many are the abundance of free ways to secure people’s commitment and in that way to create the path to your passive income.

                                                                                                                                    

I shall describe one of these today and more in future posts. Today’s little gem  is Article Marketing. In my next post I will cover E mail Signatures:

Article marketing is exactly what it sounds like. There are dozens of sites on the internet which exist solely for the purpose of providing a vehicle for the writings of authors, amateur and professional of quite short pieces on just about every subject under the sun. The consensus is that one; www.EzineArticles.com is the most prominent of these and that site certainly does make great efforts to secure the originality of its articles and to protect the intellectual property of the authors. Other article directories include ArticleDashboard.com, GoArticles.com, ArticlesAlley.com, Amazines.com and many, many others.

The idea is so simple. An article directory as they are known, provides the opportunity for anyone who wishes and is able, to write a short piece about virtually anything. In time the library of articles thus accumulated constitutes a valuable source of unique information for those in search of it.

For the online marketer however there is another, more significant benefit. The search engines also love article directories and any contribution is very likely indeed to rank highly in Google, Yahoo, and Bing, to name only the biggest among them. An article in one of the directories always carries a short bio of the author and invariably a link to his or her website or blog. Articles featured in one place are frequently picked up and repeated in numerous other sites thus creating a network of mentions for the author and for his or her site. In this way people are attracted to the site and the site owner inevitably collects more names for his list.

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

What Is Passive income?

The critical part of this is the word "PASSIVE". It means of course, the opposite of ACTIVE. In other words something that happens without a specific action at the time to make it happen. That doesn't mean that a passive income can somehow 'happen' without anyone doing anything to make it happen. Even an inheritance is the result of someone dying (I suppose that's an action!!!).

What we usually mean by 'passive income' in business is an income that is received, not as a result of the recipient taking action at the time but because of actions previously taken to set up the process that will generate future passive income.

These previous actions, in the field of internet marketing usually take the form of setting up web sites, generating traffic to them and building lists from that traffic. The members of those lists become the recipients of marketing messages by automated means resulting in some of them taking some action which generates the income for the initiator. So, it can be passive for the person who does all the work in the first place but someone, somewhere does usually have to take action at the time for that income to flow.

THE EXCITING BUSINESS OF BUILDING A LIST

In order to create a stream of passive income from in internet business it is absolutely essential to build a LIST of customers and potential customers. 

A stream of income is possible without a list but every single individual sale then has to be separately earned. Every customer communicated with and convinced to buy and that purchase provides income but the customer is then lost and if he or she is ever to buy from you again it would have to be as a result of another, separate process of contacting, convincing to buy and so on.

When you have a list and work to maintain a strong relationship with its members, there is always a reservoir of people who have either bought from you before or have at least indicated their willingness to receive marketing material from you. You have their contact details and have had the opportunity to communicate with them so that they are much more likely to trust you and therefore to buy from you in the future.

In recent years, as the internet has become so much more established and entrepreneurs have learnt from their own mistakes and those of others, one clear, effective approach to building a list and the associated relationships and trust has emerged.

That approach is to offer people items of value free of charge in return for their name and email address. The blue rectangle (an Opt-in) on this page is an example of how this is done. There is no hard sell, not even an offer of any product for sale. Just a valuable free gift. That gift may, as in this case, be followed by other free items and those by yet more offers with no attempt to sell anything. In this way trust and a mutually worthwhile relationship are established. 

The people who constitute your list know a little about you, they know from personal experience that you have access to useful information and when you eventually do offer them relevant products for sale, they are far more likely to buy from you.

Come back to this blog in a few days for more on this subject with a series of articles showing how to go about building  your list.