In keeping with the latest in information technology many types of baby DVDs have been produced to help ‘educate’ our children. Getting our kids to sit in front of the TV to watch these DVD programs also give the parents a much needed break. BUT is it good for our children? This video by InsiderMedcine.Com suggests that we should keep the DVD watching to a minimum.
I found this video and thought that a lot of you may be interested to know if there is a link between vaccines and autism.
When I added this video I thought that it would show the Autism video directly but it seems like you’ll need to scroll down the bar to find it. The other videos are all health news and interesting too but the one that I want you to view is the “Eye To Eye : Autism” video.
Here is a funny video of Aaron my son walking the ‘dog’. It’s doesn’t play very smoothly because I did a 90 degree rotation but still viewable.
They say that we should start them young! He could be your future walk the dog service provider…
Enjoy!
Many people want to know how to start an online business to start making an income right away. In my opinion the best way to do it is to work with a current hobby. Supposing you love gardening and know almost everything there is to know about gardening then you now have a good topic to start with. Let me warn you at this point that there is no free ride and it will take some work to get it started.
It is almost critical to the success of your new online business that you have at least some knowledge and passion for your chosen topic. Imagine starting a website to sell audio equipment when you have no idea what an amplifier is.
We will now examine what you could do to a current hobby and turn it into a cash pulling idea.
I have a friend who loves scrapbooking and I must admit that ignorant me didn’t even know what scarpbooking was till I read it on the her blog a couple of months ago. While the whole idea of turning it into a viable online business may seem pretty distant to some, it is actually very easy to set up once we define the outline of the whole business plan. Having an outline and some datelines to work with guarantees that one can get from point A to point B in a short amount of time. Point A being - no online business, Point B - making the first sale from your website. This can be acheived within 1-3 months work depending on your passion and input into this new project.
Now lets look at the cost to set it up before I move on to ‘how to do it’. It will cost you virtually nothing to set up your first website if you follow my proposed business model. It will just take a couple of hours of your time and work.
How To Set It Up?
Since my friend has so many years experience in scrapbooking, she could write an ebook entitled “A Beginners Guide To Scrapbooking”. This ebook can be a short 15 page guide to help someone start scrapbooking.
Here are some ideas for the content of the ebook;
Since you are just starting out and this would be your first ‘product’, no 4 and 5 can be added later on. I’ve listed it here to show you the potential and that is what most internet marketers do, short reports are usually just the appetisers with links to the entree.
The next step would be to pdf the file. (I won’t go into the software and program details here, I’ll do it in a seperate post). Once this is done you have created a digital info product that is ready for sale or to be given away free.
Let’s look at the 2 possibilities - to sell it or give it away for free?
Sell It
Like all humans our first choice would be to sell it for some profit, after all you have worked hard to put it together and you can’t imagine why I would suggest giving it away for free! If you want to sell a short usefull guide, you’ll have to sell it at a very affordable price where no one can say… ooohhh, that’s so expensive I can’t afford it. So try to keep the price below $10, at this price almost anyone who has a credit/debit card can afford it.
Give It Away For Free
I suggested giving it away for free as there are a few benefits to doing this. Supposing the guide that you wrote was a very basic guide, you could add links to a few other products that you can charge for. Perhaps another ebook like “10 Best Scrapbooking Themes” or like I mentioned in no 5, you could run a membership site (paid or free), and you want the rest of the world to know about it. There is simply no better way to advertise a product or a service than to give something away for FREE.
Somehow the word free generates a buzz and people will just flock to your website to download it. You’ll need a way to capture the names and emails of these people so that you can upsell them your other services later.
Create The Website
Once you have your product and decide to sell it or give it away, you’ll need a website for visitors to view your product.
When designing your website keep it simple and sweet. There is really no point in creating a website design that looks wonderful and your visitor has to sit there waiting the next 3 minutes for the website to load. If you need a way to collect money then use Paypal is it is free to set up an account to start accepting money online.
I will write in more detail about creating a simple webpage and all the useful software in my next post.
Once you have created your website, you need to upload it via FTP so that it can be view by the world. Now you are ready to start selling or giving away your new product.
Hello World!
Now you are ready to show the world what you’ve got!
The best free way that I know it to create a Video and upload it to YouTube. YouTube gets millions of visitors everyday and a good video can get a thousand views a day!
Use you digital camera, almost all of them have the video recording function nowadays. Set up your tripod and start shooting a video of yourself creating a scrapbook. Then sit down somewhere quite and talk to the video telling it the benefits of your new ebook.
Use Windows Movie Maker to edit your 2 videos and add the link to your new website.
Sign up for an account at YouTube if you don’t have one and upload your video. You’ll need to make your video interesting and the title interesting too, so that people are keen to view it.
Then just sit back and create more videos to upload to YouTube.
Once your video gathers momentum, people will be visiting your website and buying from you. Consider this, for every 100 people who visit your website at least 1 person will buy from you. Since you did not spend anything to set it up, it is almost free money!!
Tommorow’s post will be about the nitty gritty, the software and the how to create it stuff.
Today I am going to explain and show you how I created a $7 info product website that has given me a steady flow of pocket money for the past 6 months.
There are MANY ways to drive traffic to any website but I have only used one method for this website and the results have been quite good.
As I was always on a lookout for a good way to generate income online, I came accross this website that advertised that anyone could make a tax free income from UK Horse Racing. This was more than a year ago. I was hessitant at first but finally my curiousity got the better of me and I bought the ebook for £77 or was it £97, anyway I started to bet on UK horse races and very quickly made a lot of money!
It was basically a method of betting on the favourite to win and if you lost you would double you stake for each race till you strike a win. It was very stressful but profitable at the same time. I have since refined the horse selection method and created a website for it too.
After a couple of months the stress got to me and I was quite sick for a while, so I took a break from betting to review how and what I could to do make an income online. This was sometime in late July 07.
I decided to write an ebook to detail a few betting strategies that I had tested and proved profitable. It took me a day to write this ebook as it was not easy writing an ebook for the very first time. It’s much easier these days and I can go on writing post after post after lots of practise overe the last 6 months.
After I completed my 16 page ebook entitled “How I Make $100 a Day From UK Horse Racing” I converted it into a pdf file. Now I had a product but no way of selling it. I needed to make a website. I used freeware Mozilla Suites composer to create my webpages. I had learnt how to make simple 1 page webpages over a year ago but had never used this talent! I fiddled around with the composer and was suprised that it was really very easy to use and made my very first webpage in just an hour. I did make quite a few adjustments later on but the original webpage was very quick to setup.
I wrote my sales letter to point out all the benefits of purchasing my short report and then added a Paypal encrypted link to collect money. If you do not have a Paypal account yet, you can sign up for one here, it’s secure, fast and easy.
I decided to charge only $7 for this short ebook to make it easily affordable as I had read that many people have used $7 pricing and had great success with it.
Now I had a sales page and a product to sell but no way for potential buyers to view it. I needed a domain but was not willing to purchase a domain and pay for hosting for fear that it might not work out! So I searched the web for a free website service. I found a good one offered by Netfirms and registered http://profitsystems.netfirms.com to upload my new sales letter and ebook. My product was now ready to be sold! er….sold BUT to whom? How was I going to sell anything if no one knew about it.
I had read that there were many people using YouTube to get traffic to their websites and thought that it would my a best free shot. I say free because you don’t have to pay money to use YouTube.
Armed with my digital camera I put it on a tripod and began recording. I made a short 3 min video and used Windows Movie Maker to add my new website information to the video clip.
Here is the really amatuer video that I made. Anyone can do this with absolutely no training!
I then registered at YouTube and uploaded my video on 17th Aug and sat back and waited!
And waited and waited…..2 whole weeks past before I finally made a $7 sale! Then it was all worth it as I knew then that this could work. Even if I were to make only 1 single sale very month, the project was a big success to me. My initial cost was only my time and I had not paid a single cent to get the project up and running. $7 X 12 months would be $84 a year of pure profit. If you were to repeat the whole process and to set up 10 other websites, you’d make $840 more that year. This is what many people are doing nowadays but most of the set up VREs, short for Virtual Real Estates. More on this another day.
This is how much money I have made since that first $7 on Aug 29th 2007. Do note that I now have 6 websites.
Aug - $7
Sept - $73
Oct - $333.72
Nov - $436 and £109
Dec - $140 and £755
So far my earnings for Jan is pretty much the same as Dec but will update it here later. My earnings have platuaed as I have not been as diligent as before since I broke the 1k mark in Dec but my engines a revving away again and am planing to take it well past the 2k mark in the next few months.
In my next post I will detail how to set up an information product site using a Scrapbooking business as a model.
Ever since I joined Facebook I’ve been able to keep in touch again with friends that I have not seen since High School. One of my friends recently sent me a message to tell me that she had visited my website and wondered how I was making an income online.
After I wrote a long winded reply to her I decided that it would actually be a good topic to post here. You can read my reply below.
“There a many ways to earn a living online and blogging is just one of them.
For example I have a website that I created a few months ago that sells an information product for USD$7 and I have a video on Youtube promoting it. It cost me nothing to set up the website and create the video and it continuously generates money for me month after month.
In Dec I started a subscription website that charges a monthly membership fee and that too have taken off in a nice way.
I also have a blog that I use to talk about all my products (not MichelleKhangDotCom), it’s just a way for me to drive traffic to all my other websites that I then makes sales.
First you need to decide what your main objective is?
1. To make money…. about a topic that you enjoy
2. To make money … don’t care what it is about… just want to make money
3. Want to blog online to give your mind a voice and make money at the same time.
All of them have the potential to make you $1k and more a month if done correctly and cost you about $8 a month, even free is possible.
The best in my opinion is to start with 1, then 3 , then last 2. Eventually it will make you a full time income and you can sack your boss.
The key to making money from blogging is to blog about something that you like , not anything in general but focus on one particular topic and do your research and how what you are talking about. The traffic to make you money can be generate in a number of ways, but I now one way that will take your website to number one on google search within 4 months! That is sure income for you.
Lesson 1 completed! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Homework: decide what you really like and know a bit about - What Topic
When you are ready then let me know, we’ll do lesson 2!!! ”
If any one of you would like to start making some extra money online do let me know, I can help get the ball rolling. It really isn’t rocket science, it just takes a little research and time!
It’s been a whole week since I made my first post on this new blog, shame shame… I promise to be more consistant!
Well what have I done since then?
I had a hair cut, long hair gone and sporting a short bob now. Coloured me hair brown and have been told that I now look 10 years younger 
I finally finished the website revamp and the updated version of my ebook. Uploaded it and all but still no sales!! Ha! Maybe I should re upload the old version of the sales page… no worries I know that the sales will come in soon, I just need have some patience. This online sales thing is a sometimes a nerve wrecker as one week you’ll have 1 blessed sale then one week no sales at all, then suddenly when you start thinking that something must be very wrong or if your website is even online at all, you then get 12 sales in a week. Crazy.
I’ve recently had my Google Adsense account deleted for some unknown reason, thankfully I don’t have much revenue there just about $18 bucks. I have heard about this happening to other people before but had no idea that it would happen to me. I think it was because my Google ads and my Bidvertiser ads looked the same, I just couldn’t help it as I wanted them to blend it with my blog theme. Anyhow that’s the last of my Google Adsense but so what, there are other ways to make money online. There are many other PPC programs that I’ll check out later.
I’ve been sick the past week too, nothing serious just a little cold probably from my Ethan. He brings back all the germs from preschool and lovingly passes them to his baby bro and then me! We are so happy for our health during the school holidays that we are a bit sad when it’s over.
I am also working on a new personal project ” Project Weight Gain “. Here’s my story,
When I conceived Ethan some 4+ years ago I was about 51kgs and shot up to 72kgs when I finally delivered in June 2004. I breastfed him for 2 and a half years through Aaron’s prenancy. Right before I was pregnant with Aaron I weighed 46.5 kgs and when Aaron decided that he’d rather be born in Oct than Nov 06, I was 64.5kgs.
Aaron’s new year resolution was to give up breastfeeding and sleep through the night! And so he did, starting this year no more baby on breasts… sob sob…it’s a bit sad for me but at the same time I am so happy for him. He is only 16 months old but really behaves like a 2 or 3 year old. Especially if we were to compare him to Ethan who breastfed for double that long!! I just weighed myself this morning and …….. I am now only 45kg!!! Many people have complaint that I look too skinny.
So my new project is to gain 3 - 5 kgs. I know that this may seem like a walk in the park for a few of you, it’s so hard for me. I really eat quite a lot but never seem to put on weight. Today I bought Enercal the complete nutritional supplement, lets see if that helps!
If you have any ideas, let me now.
