In any case, it’s a great time to start your own online business!

The current recession has wiped out a lot of our savings, reduced property and investment values, removed jobs (that may never return), and reconfirmed our suspicions that the big corporations can’t be trusted and that there is really no job security (if there ever was). With these problems, comes a desire to take back control and make some extra cash to help us get back on track.

As bad as it is today, I prefer to see it as a blessing in disguise. I’ve been ‘out of work’ for over a year for the most part, and this has allowed me to finally focus on my passion, which is helping people by teaching them what I’ve learned whether that be how to play guitar, or how to start a website business online. I’ve made many mistakes and learned a lot over the last year.

To me, it’s never been a better time to start a business. This is because you can start one for almost nothing these days, especially if you do it using online tools. Instead of building the usual ‘brick and mortar’ business, which requires a large capital investment (for office space, equipment, employees, etc) you can start one with low overhead. Work from home, do everything yourself at first, or my preference – build an online business.

This can sound scarier than it is. All you really need is a website and something to sell. It doesn’t even have to be your own products. You don’t even need to incorporate, just start as a sole proprietor. A solo proprietor is basically the same as being an employee but you get to deduct your business expenses. Websites are incredibly easy to set up these days as things have progressed substantially on the Internet with many free software tools.

If you have a job and hate working there and commuting, or aren’t following your true passion, you can start this on the side after work and on weekends. This can bring in some extra cash to build back up your savings, pay off debts or for fun money. I know it’s hard to do this after a long day of work and commuting but it has to be done. But this is not a get rich quick scheme, you will have to put in some work!

If this sounds exciting to you, then stay tuned for future posts. If you have questions and can’t wait feel fee to contact me.

Leverage Attention

People used to read newspapers. Then they watched a lot of TV. Then they went online and searched. Now they spend hours on social networking sites. That’s where you need to be because that’s where your customers are.

Leverage the Technology

There’s an incredible amount of technology that you can use to help get exposure for your business. Facebook fan pages (to build a community and interact), Wordpress blogs/websites (to create websites, receive comments on your blog posts), Twitter (to post links to useful content, engage with your customers), Ustream.tv (to do live video streaming), YouTube (to post videos educating your customers), etc. There’s never been a better time to build your brand and get awareness of your company.

Leverage the Influencers

Other bloggers have spent years building a large and loyal following. Can you leverage that following and also provide value to the other blogger? For example, offer the blogger a commission on sales of your product if he interviews you via audio/video and records it, or sends emails to his followers, tweets about it, etc. I see this all the time on teleseminars and blogtalkradio.

Leverage Existing Communities

There are many forums, Facebook fan pages, groups, Linked In groups, and so on where your customers are hanging out. Other people have built these groups and managed to get a large following of engaged people talking about your niche. Go there and be helpful to these people.

Leverage Affiliates/Joint Ventures

There are many affiliates who sell other people’s products online. They’ve learned how to sell, how to create landing pages, how to create Google ads, how to build an email list and so on. Why not leverage those affiliates for your own products/services? You could post your product on Clickbank or create your own affiliate program. Partner with someone who can do more marketing or create the content split the work and the profits/risk.

Leverage Customer Data

You can leverage the information that sites like Facebook and Google have acquired over the years. And yes you can still benefit from advertising. Some of the newer technologies can target what people are searching for (Google Adwords) or Facebook ads can target people with specific interests, ages, geographical locations and so. You can also see what people are buying by checking top selling Amazon, Ebay products.

Leverage is about taking advantage of existing communities, influencers and technology to make faster progress than you can by yourself.

If you can think of other categories not mentioned above please post them in the comments.

However, when I checked one of my affiliate sites for membership sites I found that I had made $407.71 in November! I haven’t added any affiliate links to Ryan Deiss’ site recently so it could be from an older blog post or sidebar link. But actually, Ryan does a lot of ‘back-end selling’ where he sells lower priced items to get people into his funnel, then upsells them later. Some of the products are recurring so I might have to try marketing them some more!

Another thing to note is that for the Learn and Master guitar affiliate sales I didn’t do anything new this month. So the existing YouTube videos and blog posts are still working for me (and should for a long time to come). So you put in the work and hopefully over time you get the rewards off of the single effort.

So we have:
$313.22 my guitar product/membership sales
$9.98 back pain site
$37.94 adsense you tube videos
$407.71 Ryan Deiss continuity products
$1.89 amazon affiliate sales (guitar books, ets)
$19.80 share a sale Learn and Master (they have 2 different affiliate products)
$29.10 Wishlist Products (membership site plugin for wordpress)
$1 Sponsored Tweet! (advertiser paid me to do a tweet about Microsoft!)

So the grand total in November 2009 was……..$820.64 there’s been no money spent on advertising these affiliate programs…just sweat equity! This is a new record, yahoo!!!!

Just like sports athletes and actors you are a brand but at a much smaller level of course. Sponsors often want to attach their products to the famous people’s brand. With people online there are tons of ‘content experts’ in all sorts of niches which is attractive to advertisers.

So the two main ways to make money are to sell products (yours or others) and advertising. While programs like Google Adsense haven’t been that lucrative (except for my YouTube videos), there are new exciting models such as Sponsored Tweets and Ad.ly. I know a guy in British Columbia, Canada who just got paid $1000 for one tweet!

Social media marketing is huge because remember, that’s where people are, and so it can make you money online. And customers expect you to be accessible, answering their questions, dealing with their grievances, and so on.

Why do companies advertise on tv, radio, magazines, etc? Because that’s where people are, or should I say ‘were’. As people spend more of their time online, companies need to follow. However, no one likes to be sold to, and most of the ads are highly untargeted, ie. irrelevant.

Here’s the two-pronged approach you can use. Constantly create or repurpose your content, and use social media to let people know about that content, and grow a loyal following that loves your company (because you respond and give away free content). Make them offers and people will naturally want to check out your company.

So get out there and build your community!

Things that were done:

• Created a new domain using GoDaddy with ‘engage today’ in the URL, http://engagetodayseminar.com
• Created wordpress website/blog on HostGator hosting. I use hostgator because they have unlimited bandwidth and unlimited websites on one account
• Tagged blog posts with specific keywords, ‘engage today’, ‘engage today conference’, etc
• Created videos using Animoto and Camtasia Studio Version 6
  then uploaded to YouTube
• Advertised with Facebook ads and Google adwords
• Created a Squidoo page (free) http://www.squidoo.com/engagetoday2009
• Sent out a few tweets and Facebook statuses
• Kijiji classified ad posting (free but I paid for addition of URL
• Created a Facebook event
• Had my wife email hundreds oil/gas executives

In future videos I’ll go through other techniques to getting on page one of Google such as creating videos and putting articles on EzineArticles.com

You can check out his new get traffic and make money training program which has just launched as we speak.