How to Find High-Demand Products That Sell Like Hotcakes

By Paul Smithson

You can't sell a product if you don't have someone to sell it to! A good guideline to help you figure out whether Internet surfers are simply doing research - not looking to buy - is the number of words they use in their search terms.

• One or two words ("gift baskets") means they’re probably doing research.
• Three or more words ("corporate gift basket" or "gift basket supplies" or "Orange County gourmet gift basket") means they’re probably looking to buy.

You can supplement the product demand information you gather from your keyword research with the following:

• Go to PayPal.com. Click on the Shops link at the bottom of page. All 42,000 websites that accept PayPal are listed here by category. There's a Categories column on the left side of the page. Click on the category of the product you're researching. PayPal will display the top shops in that category, ranked by volume (the number of sales made through PayPal).

If, for example, you're thinking of selling tooth whiteners, you'd click on the Health and Nutrition category. And one of the things you'd find is a listing for a company that sold 16,736 of their bleaching kits through PayPal. Since that company seems to have robust sales, they're obviously making money. A tooth whitener, therefore, is a good product to sell.

• Go to groups.Google.com. In the search box, type in the kind of product you're interested in selling - let's say, a supplement that has something to do with human growth hormone. The search results will list all the news groups that are discussing human growth hormone (40,200). Click on the links and you'll find out how many people are posting to those news groups. If there are lots of them, that tells you there is a great deal of interest in human growth hormone, and a supplement like yours will probably be very popular.

• Go to Amazon.com. Click on the Top Sellers tab. The items featured there are organized by category and updated hourly. Amazon may be best known for being an online bookseller, but they also sell a wide variety of other products - computers, jewelry, apparel, automotive, personal care, cell phones, and electronics, among many others. This will give you a good idea of what people are buying on the Internet.

• Go to eBay.com. In the search box, type in the product you're interested in selling. eBay will display how many items are available for sale in that category. If you type in "yoga mats," for example, you'd find that 455 such items are available. That's good information, but what you really want to know is how well those yoga mats are selling. So click on the Sell tab at the top of eBay's home page. Then click on the Seller Central link at the bottom of the Sell page. Scroll down the page, and click on the What's Hot link, then click on Hot Items by Category. This is where you find out which categories and products are HOT - and where demand is outpacing supply!

The Four-Hour Work Week

I've been reading The Four-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. It's very engaging - smart and full of good stories and good humor. The book's argument - that you can run a successful business by working only four hours a week - is mind crack for any busy entrepreneur. Ferriss makes the idea seem plausible.

I don't remember how I found out about him. I do remember seeing a piece he wrote in Forbes Small Business that featured a photo of him training in mixed martial arts with a caption that went something like, "I run a great business... and spend more time on sports than work... using my simple time-saving system."

Ferriss is not only an interesting guy, he's a master at promoting himself. For example, he holds a world record in the tango (for the most turns made in a given time) - and to document the achievement, he got himself on Regis and Kelly. He also won a martial arts competition by, as it turns out, taking advantage of a technicality in the rules.

Ferriss was working 15 hours a day, he says, when he came across the work of economist Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto is the one who came up with the original "8/20 rule" (also known as Pareto's Law), demonstrating that 80 percent of a society's wealth is produced and owned by 20 percent of the population. "This highly debated principle," Ferriss points out, "also applies to other situations. For instance, 80 percent of a company's profits typically come from 20 percent of its products and customers."

Ferriss applied Pareto's 19th century concept to his company "by pinpointing the sources of most of my sales - and my problems - so I could spend my time more efficiently." He quickly realized that of more than 120 wholesale customers, only five were bringing in 95 percent of his revenues. Then, in a single day, he made a few simple but "emotionally difficult" decisions that changed his life for the better.

"First, I decided to stop pursuing most of my customers so that I could profile and duplicate the most profitable ones," Ferriss says. "I was spending most of my time working on small accounts, when the big five already ordered regularly without any follow up. I also abandoned being busy for being productive. I realized I could reduce my hours by limiting tasks to the critical few and cutting my work time to force myself to focus on the most important projects."

I like what I'm hearing from this guy.

Make $250,000+ a Year ... With Your Video Camera

By Paul Lawrence

When my two partners and I agreed to pursue the venture, we thought of it as almost a hobby. We all enjoyed combat sports and thought it would be cool to sell related videos. And, if we made a few extra dollars by doing it ... even better.

Fast-forward a few years and the enterprise we started is anything but a hobby. For the employs 10 people. people who now own it, it's a very serious business that nets over $250,000 a year and

But what I find really incredible about this story is that we started this business with only a few hundred dollars.

For the first videos we produced, we just rented the lowest-level broadcast-quality camera for $50. And we hired a service to do some simple edits for about $100 more. After that, we placed some small ads and created a website. The rest, as they say, is history.

Naturally, if you're financially able to purchase all the equipment, it makes the whole thing more convenient. Still, I recommend producing a video or two first. Then, once you've got some cash coming in, go ahead and buy a video camera, a computer, and the appropriate software. You should be able to get everything you need for about $6,000.

There is an almost unlimited opportunity to produce videos, because there's a demand for them in just about every area of interest. Since my experience with that first partnership, I've created and produced a variety of other videos that have all been extremely profitable. (By the way, I eventually sold my share for a nice profit.)

Some of the best kinds to produce are instructional videos. Because people are buying information - not special effects or top-notch acting - your production doesn't have to be perfectly polished. It shouldn't look like you shot it in your garage with a camcorder, but it doesn't have to look like a broadcast television show or blockbuster Hollywood movie.

You may already have the technical know-how to create your own instructional video, and you may even feel comfortable being on camera yourself. If not, no problem. All you have to do is hire people who have the skills or knowledge you lack.

In one instance, I became acquainted with a fitness instructor who had developed an awesome technique for stretching the back that really helped me. And because so many people suffer from back pain, I figured there might be a market for her system. So I hired her to host an instructional videotape that I produced.

The results were nothing short of fantastic. I made a $5,000 profit within days of putting the video up for sale. And I did it without having any personal expertise in videography.

And I'm definitely not the only one who's been able to turn instructional videos into a profitable business. KH came across a man who, in his 60s, was in better shape than most 20-year-olds. His muscles were toned and he had amazing energy and vigor. The man agreed to turn his personal exercise regimen into an instructional video (with KH as the producer) - and within 30 days of shooting it, KH had made a $10,000 profit. The best part is that KH had started with a mere $250 investment.

If you have your own area of expertise that you can transform into an instructional video, so much the better.

As I've mentioned several times in ETR, I taught ballroom dancing for years. And I've earned a nice stream of income from an instructional dance video I created during that time. Because I featured my own skills in the video, my investment was even smaller than it would have been had I needed to hire an outside expert.

One of the best things about creating and selling videos is that they can provide a continuing income stream. Once you've made the video, all you have to do is fill orders. And if you have a topic that continues to interest people - and you continue to market it - the video can sell forever.

Here's how to get started with your first "how-to" video:

1. Choose a subject.

2. Either plan to be in the video yourself or hire a qualified expert.

3. Rent or buy the camera and editing equipment.

4. Shoot and edit.

5. Using the direct-marketing techniques you read about in ETR all the time, sell the video to your target customer.

Producing and marketing your own videos is not only exciting and fun, it can also be very lucrative. Plus, this is a business where you can quickly get your foot in the door with a very small outlay of capital. Just take an inventory of subjects you know already or find interesting ... and you could be a video producer in a matter of weeks.

Second Time's a Charm

by Jay Abraham

This is the second opportunity I've had to make a meaningful impact on your business life - and I want to get right down to work.

You have a business - new or old, large or small, successful or struggling. I have the methods for making it grow, prosper, and thrive. More importantly, I can teach you how to do all that easier, faster, safer, and with far less stress than the way you've been trying to do it.

And I'm going to prove that to you right now.

His name is Doug. (No last name needed.) Doug is frustrated and feeling beleaguered. (Perhaps you are, too.) He's struggling and up against a mental wall. (Sound familiar?) Doug hasn't enjoyed the success or results he's been expecting since he started his business. So he asked me this question:

"What advice/resources would you give to an over-40 entrepreneur who has not had a lot of financial success in his life? The problem seems to me to be psychological."

Psychological? Apparently, Doug feels that his problem is something "inside" him - low self-image, perhaps... or low expectations. And he desperately wants to know how he (you?) can step out of this mental "miasma." (See "Word to the Wise," below.)

* First, recognize that success is a combination of ability and possibility... all mixed with the healthy understanding that failure is not a permanent state - only a temporary response to a test or experiment that didn't work out.

Stated differently, most of you are needlessly limiting, restricting, and unintentionally impeding the level of success, income, certainty, and control you can have in business - all because you're not seeing how much more you can really do.

* Stop doing that!

First of all, in business, being a good marketer is the key difference between mediocrity and making millions, tens of millions... even billions.

So the first thing you have to do to change your negative mindset is become a more masterful marketer. That can increase your long-term business success rate by more than 10 times - if you know how to do it right.

Next, you need to develop what I call "funnel vision" instead of "tunnel vision." When you have funnel vision, you see with absolute certainty not only what is possible - but also exactly how to engineer and successfully achieve any and all realistic (or even audacious) goals you set for yourself.

My way of developing funnel vision is to study different approaches that have been "borrowed" from one industry and successfully adapted for use in another industry. What you learn is that if you are the first one to use such a concept in your industry, it could skyrocket your success. Stated differently - a business-building approach that's as common as dirt in one industry can have the profit-making impact of an atom bomb... if you are the first/only one in your industry to try it.

There's one more factor involved in greatly improving your success in business. You need to become an expert in three techniques that I'll be elaborating on in the weeks to come:

(1) masterminding

(2) testing various assumptions

(3) building on multiple income streams, revenue sources, and profit centers.

So, Doug (and everyone else who feels the same way), as you can see, success in business has nothing to do with your psychological makeup. It's all about developing a certainty about what works and what doesn't... and what works better and best... to build a recurring business income model.

Unfortunately, they don't teach this at business school. But that's what I'm going to do - in easy-to-master installments - in the weeks and months to come.

Grab Market Share - but Be Prepared for What's Going to Happen When You Do

by Paul Lawrence

One of the most effective strategies to break into a new market and obtain market share is to offer your product or service at a much lower price than that of your competitors. In fact, this was the subject of the very first ETR message: "The Most Powerful Way to Grow a Business".

It is often possible to do this by containing your expenses and being willing to start out with a smaller price margin. And then, once you are well established, to slowly raise your price closer to the rest of the market and increase your profitability further.

I have done this with several types of small businesses (you can learn about many of them in my Microbusiness program) - but for today's discussion, I'd like to talk about one in particular.

Several years ago, I began and became the successful operator of a swimming pool maintenance business.

When I started this business, I determined that the competition had a very large profit margin and that I could still make money by offering my service at a much lower price.

The strategy worked very well, and I rapidly built a thriving small business. But some problems cropped up that I hadn't expected at all.

When executing this "discount price" strategy, I had anticipated that I would have trouble keeping expenses low enough to earn a large enough profit. And I was concerned that customers might be skeptical as to the quality or the reliability of my service.

In fact, neither of these things happened.

What did become a problem was that my competitors became very hostile toward my business and took action to try and destroy it.

One of the things they did was report me to government regulatory agencies for running an "unlicensed" business.

You see, in the swimming pool maintenance business, you have to be able to purchase the chemicals you use at a wholesale rate. And this wholesale rate is only available to licensed companies.

Fortunately, I did have the license. So this effort on the part of my competitors to shut me down didn't do any harm. But they did use their clout to make life difficult for me in my dealings with the few pool-chemical vendors in the South Florida market where my business was located.

One very large competitor threatened to pull his business from a certain vendor if he continued to sell to me. Because of the competitor's size, the vendor, although apologetic, cut me off.

I quickly realized that if this were to happen with one or two more vendors, I would be out of business. So I changed my strategy.

But I'll be honest. My first reaction to the hostility was to be defiant.

When I received nasty calls, I snarled back at the callers and shouted (with an equal number of profanities) that this was America and I could charge any price I wanted. But after being cut off from that first wholesale vendor, I realized that what I needed was a strong ally.

I contacted one of my other large competitors and told him that I'd like to propose an arrangement whereby he could earn additional profits.

I explained that I was a young company with a low overhead and thus didn't have any repair staff on hand. But my business was growing - and I was finding that I needed to have a way to handle repairs that my customers wanted to have done.

I proposed that this competitor could handle those repairs in exchange for my receiving a small "commission."

The deal made sense and he agreed.

I then began using the same vendor that this guy used. (And I made it clear to the vendor that this competitor and I had a "business relationship.") With a strong ally on my side, I was then immune to the griping of other competitors.

10 Tips for Safer International Travel

by Lori Appling

1. If you're traveling to an unfamiliar country, it's a good idea to contact the American Embassy for information about safety. They can tell you what crimes U.S. citizens need to be wary of and what precautions you should take. You'll find a listing of U.S. Embassies and Consulates at http://usembassy.state.gov .

2. Do a little research about clothing customs and pack accordingly. In Turkey, for instance, in many places it's considered provocative for a woman to show her knees. The website http://www.internationalbenefits.com talks about making the most of international travel, including dressing appropriately.

3. Don't wear flashy jewelry or expensive watches. Arrange to keep your valuables and passport in a hotel safe. If you need to carry them with you, a money belt or pouch worn under your clothes is the most secure way.

4. Don't travel with cash. Instead, consider traveler's checks and credit cards.

5. Make a photocopy of your passport and take it with you. If you have the misfortune of losing your passport or it gets stolen, this will make it easier for the American Embassy to arrange a replacement. Consider leaving an additional copy with a friend at home. Extra passport photos are helpful, too.

6. Ask the American Embassy or the country's tourist bureau about laws that are different from those in the U.S. In Singapore, for instance, you can be fined instantly for smoking in public buildings, littering, jaywalking, spitting, feeding birds in public places, chewing gum on the local transport system, and failing to flush public lavatories.

7. Check with the tourist board or your local phone company for instructions on how to call home. AT&T and MCI have toll-free numbers that reach a U.S. operator. You can then use a credit card or phone card to make a call.

8. Keep your prescriptions in their original bottles. Drug laws are very serious in many countries. The original containers, along with copies of your prescriptions, will help you avoid problems. Be especially mindful of prescriptions that contain narcotics. In that case, a letter from your doctor is a good idea, too.

9. If you are traveling alone, make sure a friend back home has your itinerary and knows where you will be and when.

10. Use your street smarts. Keep to well-lit places at night, and be aware of the people around you.

What's Better Than Money When You Don't Have Any?

by Jay Abraham

If you're thinking of starting a new business, or if your existing business wants to grow, it's easy to get frustrated if you don't have the capital to fund what you're dreaming about.

But you don't have to be frustrated. You can use your creative alternatives - and they are extensive.

First, ask yourself the two big questions: "If I had the money, how would I use it?" And "What would I spend it on?"

For example, do you want to run ads, hire a sales force, or build an Internet website or e-commerce division? Do you want to expand your inventory? Your product offerings? Or do you need more technology, software, computers, and so forth? What is the purpose of your capital requirements. That is, where would that money go?

Once you're clear on the answers to those questions, realize that you can persuade plenty of businesses and people to provide you with the equivalent of what your money would be used for. But instead of paying them upfront cash, they'll probably accept a more creative payment alternative.

Here's a good example to stimulate your mind ...

A past client of mine had zero marketing money. So we got 1,000 magazines, newspapers, TV and radio stations to run ads for us, selling a starter-sized unit of our product for a $3 purchase. The advertising media put up over $20 million in advertising for free, so we let them keep all the money from the first purchase (the $3 sell). We got enormous exposure - and a million people who purchased for the first time. But we also got 100% of the back-end (repurchases) too! And 500,000 out of the million people kept repurchasing over and over again. (They averaged 10 times with an average of $3 per purchase - or $30 each on the back end.)

This promotion did so well that we made an 80% gross profit. In fact, a NYSE-listed company asked us to sell the company for tens of millions of dollars.

Does this give YOU any ideas?

Here's another example ...

A friend of mine needed a sales force, but he had no money to pay for salaries, travel, and so forth. So he did two brilliant things.

First, he found three people locally who sold non-competitive products to the same market he was targeting and offered them twice the normal commission to take on his product. They did - and sold millions of dollars worth.

But he didn't stop there. He found a large, well-capitalized telemarketing company whose main activity was calling homeowners at night. Since they hardly used their daytime hours, they were delighted to sell my friend's "business to business" product for him during that normally light time - and receive half the profit (which was four times their normal compensation). My friend didn't care, because every sale that they generated was pure windfall profit (see "Word to the Wise," below) for him - and, of course, he also got 100%, of the back end.

Another friend found a business that had over 100,000 square feet of unused storage warehouse capacity. My friend needed 75,000 square feet, but was low on capital. He persuaded that company to furnish him with their unused space ... in exchange for a small share of the sales he generated with the new products that he was able to inventory.

Still another exciting story is about a friend who wanted to be in the business of selling cassettes at grocery stores and mini-marts. But he had no capital.

He learned my theory: that there's always someone out there who needs what you want or need even worse than you need or want it ... and who will be eager to make it happen for you. So he went out and found a huge music distributor that had just lost a major account and wanted to replace the business. He easily persuaded them to furnish hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tapes for him to distribute in a way that allowed him to offer the grocers better payout terms than their current suppliers. Both sides prospered mightily.

Or how about barter?

You can trade whatever product or service you sell or make for whatever you need. I've traded my consulting and seminar-type products for expensive trips, cars, jewelry, furnishings, and services for my office.

When they didn't have capital, I've seen people make deals to get needed products or services (such as giving the provider a share of future sales in exchange for the needed items) for a period of time or up to a multiple over the market value of the product or service furnished.

For example, once a friend got a software company to give him $200,000 of needed software in exchange for giving them 3% of his future sales for 18 months or $400,000, whichever came first.

How To Make A Million Dollars As A Mover

Startup costs: $2,000

After college, Brian Altomare had several startup business ideas, from selling 1-800 numbers (which he learned was illegal) to starting an internet marketing company (which he ended up doing with three college buddies). While the internet marketing business didn't last, Altomare's memories of moving in and out of college dorms did--and they inspired him to start MadPackers in 2005.

Describing the experience of moving into his dorm with his father's help as "horrendous," Altomare saw a need for a company that simplified the college moving experience. After sitting on the idea for a year, he researched everything from couriers to price points before starting MadPackers as a one-employee, homebased operation. Altomare's business, which offers moving services for college students and provides packing supplies, now employs 55 people, and he envisions MadPackers evolving into an all-purpose company serving college students.

The company's sales for last year were $800,000, which Altomare says puts MadPackers on track to meet his sales projections of $1.5 million for 2007. One way MadPackers is reaching its target audience and building sales is by aligning itself with music entertainment. In March, the company launched its Door to Dorm concert tour, which visited 17 campuses and three festivals.

Altomare attributes much of the company's growth to its 2005 partnership with Universal Express Inc., a company offering luggage delivery and other services to travelers. Universal Express has not only invested in MadPackers, but it also provides customer service support, logistics and guidance to the company.

Still, Altomare says he has learned quite a few lessons on his own, from not hiring friends and family to making sure to pay interns and learning to take breaks. "At a certain point after you've developed the concept or the idea, remove yourself from the brand and the company," he recommends. "Take a break and go explore the world."

How to Do the Impossible: Create a Paperless Life, Never Check Voice Mail Again, Never Return Another Phone Call

Forget the paperless office - that’s aiming too low.

Let’s take a look at the bigger picture: a paperless life. While we’re at it, let’s also eliminate three other nuisances: answering the phone, checking voice mail, and returning phone calls.

Is this possible? It is. The key to finding means to accomplish the "impossible" is asking the right question: "How would you do ____ for a week if your life depended on it?" Most things considered impossible just haven’t been looked at through the "how" lens of lateral thinking.

Here are two warm-up exercise questions for Paperless Life 101:

What would you have to do to never again touch mail?

What would you have to do to never touch another check?

Consider these as real questions. If I offered you a million dollars to stop doing these two things for a month, could you do it? Here are a just a few potential strategies you could use… then we’ll move on to phone games:

• No more mail

First, we need to cut out the crap - reduce volume. To begin, get removed from junk-mail lists and common commercial mailing lists. There are a few ways to do this:

1. Get removed from the most common junk-mail lists at dmaconsumers.org. (This costs a few dollars in some cases.) And check alternative strategies at stopjunkmail.org.
2. Use LifeLock, or another identity-protection service, which automatically removes you from large mailing lists, one of the most common vehicles for identity theft.
3. Have your mail forwarded to special processing centers, where it is all scanned and e-mailed to you. One popular service is Remote Control Mail, which offers two big benefits to the time-focused and mobile-minded: (a) Relevant postal mail is funneled into e-mail, so you can check both e-mail and postal mail at once. (b) You can travel freely, whenever and wherever, without ever missing a letter.

• No more checks

1. Set up online banking so you can issue checks directly from your bank, and set up automatic recurring payments.
2. Give your accountant power of attorney to sign specific checks (for tax documents, etc.) on your behalf. Power of attorney is no joke, so do your homework - but it can be used with little risk. This approach not only cuts down on checks but also on finance-related mail, which you can then forward to your accountant for handling, start-to-finish.

"But what of the other 9-to-5 headaches?" you ask. "How can I eliminate the need to answer the phone, check voice mail, or return phone calls?

Here are a few quick fixes:

• No more answering the phone

Use a service like GrandCentral so you can listen to your voice mails as they’re being left. Each caller is required to announce their name before the call is dialed, and you are able to preview the name and then send the call to voice mail, where you can listen to the message they’re leaving. If you want to speak with them, you can jump in. If not, let them leave the message.

• No more voice mail

Stop managing separate inputs from office phone voice mail, cellphone voice mail, and multiple e-mail accounts. Consolidate. Get your voice mail delivered to your e-mail inbox, which then serves as your single communications "funnel" - with all your e-mail, postal mail, and voice mail in one place. GrandCentral can e-mail audio files, but for those who want text, Simulscribe is a popular option with nearly 90 percent transcription accuracy.

To further encourage people to communicate with you via e-mail, there are two approaches that I’ve used effectively: Indicate in your voice mail greeting that they must leave their e-mail address, and then respond to them via e-mail. You can also use a service like Jott to send a voice message to them as an e-mail.

• No more returning calls

Pinger enables you to send voice mail to people without calling them. Why would you want to do that? Pinger’s website explains:

"We’ve all been there - you make a call and think to yourself, ‘please don’t pick up,’ or you call and think ‘I hope I’m not interrupting…’ With Pinger you leave the message at your convenience, and they get it at their convenience. Unlike voice mail, there is no ringing, no annoying prompts, no lengthy greetings - just your message."

None of these strategies is perfect, but they do demonstrate that none of our impossible questions are impossible to answer. Once you frame the question in terms of "how would I…?" it is entirely possible to stop tolerating most of life’s annoyances and eliminate them altogether.

How to Make a New Business Work

Apart from starting off with (and sticking to) a good plan, there are nine secrets I’ve discovered to making a start-up business work:

1. Don't spend too much time planning.
2. The most effective way of entering a new market is to offer a popular product at a much lower price.
3. It’s ultimately about selling.
4. Don't spend too much money.
5. Before you invest time and money in any business, know exactly how much you are willing to lose - and get out if you hit that point.
6. Get operational fast.
7. Go for the quick cash first.
8. Let your winners run and cut your losses short.
9. Pay attention to Pareto’s Law (the 80-20 rule): 80 percent of your success comes from 20 percent of your resources.
10. Under - promise and over - deliver
11. Schedule for on-time delivery.

Build a Business That Doesn’t Need You

Entrepreneurs start there dream business in there garage. Business takes off. Entrepreneur slowly becomes de facto head of marketing, sales, product development, customer service, shipping etc., etc. Business booms but then stalls. The problem? The founder no longer has time to be that original entrepreneur who had the great ideas and the energy that brought about the initial success.

If your company’s survival is based on you, you don’t have a business, you have a self-employment job.

Entrepreneurs fall into this trap, too. After initial success, they discover that they’ve dug themselves into a hole. They can’t take a vacation. They can’t take on any of the other projects they’re interested in because all their time is wrapped up in this one business. And one day they wake up and find out that they are the company. Without them, it will fall apart.But it doesn’t have to be this way. Even though it’s tough - because you are financially and emotionally invested in your business - you need to get out of the way so your business can grow.

From day one, you should be planning to build a company that doesn’t need you. One of the first things you need to do is let go of your ego and find a superstar who can eventually run your company. Then you can focus on your big vision and more ideas.

And especially if your business is "personality based," you need to create other related "pods'’ that can generate income from sources other than "you."

Facts Every Marketer Needs to Know About Refunds

Many marketers, both large and small (and I include myself among the latter) go bonkers when customers return products for a refund.

As BK, an executive with one of the biggest and most famous direct-marketing publishing companies, told me, "Our books contain great information, incredibly valuable. Why should we allow someone to read the book, benefit from all that great content, and then cheat us by sending it back for a refund?"

If you feel the same way, let me share with you a few important facts about refunds:

1. First of all, a refund request doesn’t mean your product is bad or the customer doesn’t like it.

Example: A customer returns your $300 DVD set on investing in foreign currencies. "It actually seems like a great program," the customer says in his refund request. "But after watching it, I’ve decided this isn’t a business I want to get into. It’s just too much work!"

To me, this is a perfectly legitimate - and reasonable - position for a customer to take… don’t you agree? In this case, offering a refund is not only a legal requirement but also eminently fair: Why would you want your customer to be out of pocket $300 for something he can’t use?

2. Offering a refund doesn’t cost you money. It makes you money.

Novice marketers fret about offering a money-back guarantee. "If I do that," they worry, "won’t some customers take advantage of me by profiting from the information in my material… and then returning it?"

Yes, some will. But here’s the thing: Offering a money-back guarantee reduces buyer reluctance and increases buyer confidence… resulting in more orders. In almost every instance, the greater revenues and profits from the increase you get in sales by offering a guarantee is MUCH greater than the small amount of money you lose issuing refunds.

After all, would you buy a product for $30 or $100 or more - sight unseen - without a money-back guarantee? Of course not.

3. Longer guarantees are better than shorter guarantees.

If you are currently offering a 10- or 15-day money-back guarantee, extend it to 30 days. Already offering a 30-day money-back guarantee? Then test a 60- or 90-day money-back guarantee.

The longer guarantee term invariably increases response rates and sales, because it eliminates the concern many buyers have with a short guarantee - specifically, that they will forget to open and try the product… and that by the time they get around to it, the guarantee will have expired and they’ll be stuck with it.

Not only that, the longer guarantee actually reduces refund requests.

Reason: The buyer is in no hurry to evaluate and return the product.

Result: The buyer soon forgets about the guarantee… and whether he actually uses the product or not, he just keeps it.

4. Generous guarantees sell more product than miserly guarantees.

Ever see a guarantee that says you’ll get your money back if the product is returned "in saleable condition"? With a guarantee like that, the prospect worries that if he does return it, you’ll claim it arrived scratched or broken.

Similarly, some sellers of information products offer a money-back guarantee… but only if you offer documented proof that you followed their system and it did not work for you. But what if I get your system, but something comes up and I decide I don’t have time to work through it. Am I stuck with it because I didn’t use it?

The more unconditional your money-back guarantee is, the higher your response rates will be. Conditional guarantees depress orders.

Here’s something interesting to consider…

A year or so ago, I began selling e-books online.

With a hard-copy book, my guarantee is: If you don’t like it, return the book and we will refund your money.

But you can’t really return an e-book. I thought about eliminating the guarantee, but realized that is absurd. Instead, I stress the fact that buyers can get a refund without returning the product.

My standard e-book guarantee reads: "If you are not 100% satisfied for any reason - or for no reason at all - just let me know within 90 days. I’ll refund your $29 payment in full. No questions asked. And you can keep the e-book FREE, with my compliments. That way, you risk nothing."

Result: My refund rate on e-books is lower than for any other information product I sell, including CDs and hard-copy books. In fact, I get virtually no refund requests on e-books, though you could say my guarantee openly invites people to take advantage of me.

My conclusion? Yes, there are a few con artists out there. But most people - especially when you are open and fair with them - are honest and will be fair with you in return.
So follow my advice on refunds. Then watch your sales volume - and profits - soar.
I guarantee it - or your money back!

A Free Internet Tool That Can Add Thousands to Your Bottom Line

Imagine a "magic" well that you could tap into any time you wanted - one that would make it possible for you to simply drop a bucket into it and pull up any of the following:

• New customers for your company
• Excellent employees
• Skilled consultants in almost any field
• People with cash who want to invest in your business
• Buyers or renters for your real estate

Well, this is not a fairy tale. With the CraigsList website, you can do all of the above and a lot more. And you can do it for free!

CraigsList was founded in 1995 by self-described "computer geek" Craig Newmark when he started using a list server to post notices about events in the San Francisco area. People eventually began using his site to post notices for job openings, cars for sale, apartments for rent, and even personal ads.

The site grew by word of mouth, and now serves 450 cities worldwide, gets more than seven billion page views each month, and ranks with Google, Yahoo, eBay, AOL, and Microsoft as one of the top 10 most-heavily trafficked English-language websites.

Here’s how to harness the power of CraigsList:

CraigsList Is a Fantastic Place to Find Job Seekers in Practically Any Industry

If you’re looking for someone to do just about any kind of job - mow your lawn or refinish your cabinets, for example - you will probably find a qualified candidate on this site. I posted an ad for a Web page builder in the Miami area. Within 24 hours, I was inundated by over 50 applicants, most of whom were offering their services at very reasonable rates.

With a little effort, I was able to find a qualified individual who was willing to do the work from thousands of miles away for $12 an hour. And he built a site for me that had quite a few complicated features, such as:

• An automated shopping cart for my customers to place credit card orders
• An automated product-delivery system that instantly delivers my product (a book) as a PDF file to the customer
• A number of links and pages that incorporate quotes, photos, and other graphics

This very sophisticated website cost me approximately $120 - total - to construct.

But CraigsList can offer you much more than access to Internet webmasters. You can use it to recruit full-time or temporary employees for any business. It costs nothing to post job-recruitment ads for all but a few cities (including New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Boston, Seattle, San Diego, and San Francisco).

You Can Create Income With CraigsList, Too!

There are several ways to generate income with CraigsList.

If you are seeking new clients, you can place your own advertisements in the Services section. You can also scan various forums on the site for people who are looking for the kind of services you provide.

If you have something to sell, you can do it on CraigsList via its Classified section. This is a great way to make a few extra bucks the next time you clean out the attic. And you could conceivably make substantial profits by selling high-ticket items like houses, cars, or furniture, just to name a few.

5 Steps to Getting Started:

1. Go to CraigsList.org and select the city where you’ll be conducting your buying/selling/hiring/etc.
2. Choose an appropriate category. For example, if you wanted to sell a computer, you’d go to the For Sale section of the site. Then, within that section, you’d click on the Computers category.
3. Write a catchy headline and copy for your advertisement. (You can choose to let people see your e-mail address or have CraigsList forward all the responses to you… anonymously and for free.)
4. Post your ad by clicking on the button in your selected category that says "Post."
5. Your ad will run for 30 days before it automatically terminates, but you can have it removed at any time. (When you place the ad, you’ll get a confirmation via e-mail with instructions how to edit or pull your ad.)

A word of caution: As with all classified-style advertising, keep in mind that you’re dealing with strangers on CraigsList. So protect yourself by thoroughly checking references for the people who respond to your job offers. And if you’re selling something - especially a high-priced item - ask for payment via a cashier’s check or money order made out to you.

CraigsList is an enormously popular website that offers many ways for you to benefit - both in business and in your personal life. Taking advantage of free Internet websites like this is just one of many "street smart" tactics every small-business entrepreneur should be engaging in.

Becoming Your Own Bank

By Alan Cowgill

Susan was the last to
report. With no small sense of accomplishment, she told the room of 227 attendees that she had managed to secure $1.5 million in commitments from private lenders. When we added the commitments obtained by other students at my recent Private Money Bootcamp in Las Vegas, the total was over $73 million.

It’s always gratifying to help beginning and seasoned investors alike get past one of the hurdles slowing their progress: not having enough money to do their real estate deals. In all, over the last few years, my Private Money students around the country have reported acquiring financing commitments of more than $425 million!

And it doesn’t just work for houses. Last year, one of my students, Robert Anderson, used private money to purchase a $1.8 million apartment building. He used one of the techniques I teach to structure the deal so that he had no payments until the property sold.

He sold it eight months later for approximately $3.3 million. After paying the bank back the loan plus approximately $255,000 in interest, he walked away with a $1.2 million profit for himself. And that was Robert’s first real estate deal.

Of course, I use these same techniques myself. I’ve bought over 200 homes and small multi-unit properties since my first real estate deal back in 1995. Today, my team and I buy an average of five to seven houses a month. All of it is done with private money.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

• With private money, you can do all-cash deals… scooping up bargains that are off-limits to investors who depend on bank financing.
• You provide your lenders with a high-yield, safe alternative to the stock market.
• You don’t have to wait three or four weeks or more, as you do with bank loans, so you can buy under-market deals from sellers who need to sell now.
• If you’ve quit your job to become a full-time investor, the bank quits you. That doesn’t happen with private money.
• You set the terms of the loan, not a bank
• Every successful deal creates more funds for your next deal. Your lenders want to put their money to work with you again, and often refer other potential lenders to you.
• You don’t have to deal with providing the stacks of tax returns, applications, and endless forms required by banks
• When you buy a property at a good enough discount, you can borrow the entire purchase price from your private-money lenders, plus closing costs and repairs. That’s not going to happen with a bank.
• You never pay the outrageous fees set by hard-money lenders
• You can structure some deals so there are no monthly payments. (I’ve done this with about half of mine.) This solves potential cash-flow problems on major rehabs or luxury homes

Those are just some of the benefits. And the best part is that, once you understand a few key concepts, building your private-money network is easy.

But there are a few things you have to make sure you do right first.

Marketing and Presentation Skills Are Key

You need to know how to market for private money. There are things that will work, and things that won’t… and things you can say, and things you can’t.

You need a clear, credible, and benefit-filled presentation. If you just try to "wing it," you may end up turning a potential investor off by coming across as someone who is unprepared and not serious. And how many times can you "go back to the well" once you’ve made a less-than-favorable impression?

As you expand your private-money network, you need to make sure you’re following all state and federal rules and regulations. In most states, you can build a network of a few dozen lenders without filing a bunch of paperwork. Go beyond that number, and you must do the filing. Cross state lines, and there are other docs to file. And there are regulations to follow if you "pool" money.

Those rules and regulations apply only when you cross certain thresholds. And they’re not too cumbersome if you just take the time to understand them and do what you’re supposed to do. So here are a few pointers…

Keeping in the Good Graces of the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC)

When it comes to complying with SEC regulations, you will be in one of three situations.

1. You don’t have any private lenders, but are ready to jump in the water and start bringing them on board.

STOP!!

First, you need to do the following:

1. Create your disclosure document to be handed out to lenders.
2. Understand your state’s SEC compliance threshold.
3. Find an SEC attorney and let him in on what you are doing.
4. Complete your disclaimer statement.

Whether or not you have to file with the SEC depends on how you decide to operate.

• If you are going to work with family, friends, and associates and stay under your state’s compliance threshold, you don’t need to file.
• If you are going to advertise, pool money, work with strangers, cross state lines, and/or go beyond your state’s compliance threshold, you’ll need to file with your state’s SEC office before you approach your first private lender. (You will also need to notify your state’s SEC office before you get your first private lender if you are in one of 10 states that require you to do so.)

2. You have a few private lenders, but are under your state’s compliance threshold.

You need to do all the above, plus complete a form to let the SEC office look back to see what you have been doing.

3. You are over your state’s compliance threshold, and have made a mess.

In this case, hire an SEC attorney and let him guide you through the jungle. You won’t like it, but I believe it’s better to put all your cards on the table face up and take your spanking rather than wait and hope you don’t get in trouble.

The bottom-line…

You’re dancing with a gorilla. Why take a chance? There are rules on how to play the game. The SEC controls the rule book, and they are there to protect the consumer, not you.

The easiest way to be in compliance is to take the appropriate steps before you secure your first private lender and start your business off on the right foot.

I find that many real estate investors are scared of the SEC. If they would only follow the rules from day one, they wouldn’t have anything to worry about.

Word Of Consumers

Take a cue from Vichy Korea (skin care): since end of last year, they've been inviting customers to blog about their experience with the Myokine anti-wrinkle product line. Consumers shared and tracked results day by day, adding updates in real time. Vichy not only 'learned', but also gave back by having skin experts answer individual questions. 9,000 people signed up for the program. Vichy France also asked its customers to pitch in on Journal de ma Peau, a blog about their 'Peel Micro Abrasion' product.

In the Netherlands, retail chain Kijkshop is recruiting webcam-testers to film their week-long use of electrical shavers, hand blenders, mobile phones and other devices. Every month, 15 to 20 webcams will be installed in kitchens, bathrooms, and living rooms across The Netherlands. Kijkshop is now putting the first 3-5 minute long movies (and reviews) online for all to see. More than 5,000 people have already expressed interest in taking part.

TV Wardrobe

Fast Company: We're talking about consumers who want to own the same pair of jeans that Meredith wears on "Grey's Anatomy" or a dress that was seen on Gabrielle's character on "Desperate Housewives." The Times dubs this new phenomenon "shopping-enabled entertainment," a rapidly-growing marketplace now aided by several new websites selling the most popular and fashionable of the as-seen-on-TV products to consumers.

Shopping enabled entertainment gives a whole new meaning to product placement where viewers no longer have to be persuaded by advertisers to buy their products, but instead their brands are being actively sought-out by a celebrity-obsessed culture.

I first came across such fans last summer when reading message board posts on a design magazine's website. One fan had just seen the movie "The Break Up" with Jennifer Anniston and Vince Vaughn and was dying to locate the living room furniture used to decorate the couple's condo. The message board soon revealed hundreds of other fans who had admired the set as well and were seeking advice on which stores carried the exact couch, the end table and even the paint color on the walls.

Now, websites such as SeenON.com or StarStyle.com cater exclusively to these consumer demands and fans no longer have to fret over where to find their favorite TV items; a visit to the sites reveals just how extensive this market has become. As reported in the Times article, these websites don't just sell the clothes and accessories worn by characters on more than 100 televisions shows and movies, they also allow visitors to take virtual tours of TV and movie sets to purchase the tiniest details such as the Tupperware set used by Bree on an episode of "Desperate Housewives."

How To Make 5 Million Dollars With A Microsite

http://www.organicbouquetwholesale.com/

Gerald Prolman launched OrganicBouquet.com in 2003 to sell sustainably grown flowers that are freshly picked and then gift-wrapped. But as the company grew, he needed a better way to meet the increasing demand from florists, event planners and other whole-salers. So in June, Prolman launched a microsite to make it easier for these customers to place orders.

A microsite lets you focus on a specific purpose, such as selling clearance or discounted items, selling products to businesses vs. consumers, promoting new merchandise, or trying out a new product line. Sometimes the design and navigation of a microsite differs from its parent site. “Unlike consumers, florists shop by variety and color, so the site is set up to help florists find what they need quickly,” says Prolman, 46, who projects 2006 sales of up to $5 million for his San Rafael, California, company.

So why didn’t Prolman just launch a separate section on his existing website to focus on wholesalers? Simple: to prevent consumers or future competitors from having easy access to the customized pricing available to wholesale customers. “The pricing is tailor-made for each customer based on volume,” says Prolman. “Once approved as a wholesale account, they will be given access to the site.”

When Smaller Is Better And More Profitable

Bucking the trend of ever-expanding dining portions, Chicago-based Minnies is out to prove that bigger isn't always better. Featuring a wide selection of bite-size gourmet burgers and sandwiches—including traditional favorites such as grilled cheese and Reubens, alongside the more inventive Mykonos (roast chicken, tzaziki sauce and kalamata tapenade) and Thanksgiving delight (roast turkey, cranberries and wild rice gravy)—Minnies applies nouvelle cuisine portions to casual dining. Besides serving waistline-minded eaters something to nibble on, the fifties-style diner gives hungrier customers the mix-and-match pleasure of tapas restaurants.

While other restaurants are starting to offer Lilliputian portions in response to consumer demand, serving miniatures-only is a niche concept that could definitely take off, much like dessert-only eateries. While Minnies isn't currently offering franchises, interested parties are encouraged to submit their contact information should they elect to do so in the future. In the meantime, this could be a fun one for budding restaurateurs to replicate in other regions.

How To Make $4000 A Week From A Silly Cat Picture

http://icanhascheezburger.com/

Eric Nakagawa, a software developer in Hawaii, posted a single photo of a fat, smiling cat he found on the Internet, with the caption, "I can has cheezburger?" in January, 2007, at a Web site he created. It was supposed to be a joke. Soon after he posted a few more images in the same vein: cute cats with funny captions written in a silly, invented hybrid of Internet shorthand and baby-talk. Then he turned the site into a blog, so that visitors could comment on the postings. What happened after that would have been hard for anyone to predict.

"We just thought, O.K., they're funny,"Nakagawa says. "Suddenly we started getting hits. I was like, where are these coming from?"

He saw traffic on the blog, I Can Has Cheezburger, which he runs with his partner, "Tofuburger" (she refuses to disclose her real name) double each month: 375,000 hits in March, 750,000 in April, 1.5 million in May. Cheezburger now gets 500,000 page views a day from between 100,000 and 200,000 unique visitors, according to Nakagawa. The cheapest ad costs $500 for a week. The most expensive goes for nearly $4,000. Nakagawa, an accidental entrepreneur who saw his successful business materialize out of the ether, quit his programming job at the end of May: "It made more sense to do this and see how big it could get."

Cheezburger's story is unusual in the upper reaches of the blogosphere in that the time between launching and reaching a critical mass of readers who sustain the site is so compressed. But many of the most popular bloggers have similar tales of starting out with a niche idea—an inside joke, a particular obsession—and watching it explode. Of course, most blogs linger in obscurity and are read by only a handful of people, and few ever reach the level Cheezburger has. What about a blog like Cheezburger lets it break away from the pack?

The initial appeal of the blog may have been a fluke, but its growth since then has been part of a tightly controlled experiment to help answer that question. Nakagawa and his partner constantly tweak the site to see what draws readers and what leaves them cold.

"We basically have a playground where people keep coming to play, so we're trying to create new games all the time,"Nakagawa says.

To drive traffic, they try to time their new posts with when people are most likely to be reading: in the mornings, on their lunch breaks, or in the evenings. Early on, when Nakagawa saw the site getting 1,000 page views a day, he added a widget that allows visitors to rate each post on a scale of one to five cheeseburgers. That helped boost traffic to 2,000.

Readers don't just rate or comment on the posts. They create them. Cheezburger depends on its fans to submit pictures, write funny captions, and send them in. Nakagawa has built a tool to let readers select a ready-made photo or upload their own, add and position captions, choose font styles, and submit a finished product. Any visitor can vote on the submissions, and the most popular ones make it to the main page. The function saves Nakagawa from having to find funny captions for photos, and it creates a lasting bond with readers.

That kind of interaction helps make I Can Has Cheezburger as much a community as a blog. A post by one user will inspire another to play off the theme, forming a narrative. "It's like you're creating a story supplied by people in the community, and then the people in the community supply the next part of the story,"Nakagawa says.

The idea of building a community around content supplied by users sustains several top blogs, and most put the idea of community ahead of making money. For Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, who lampoon celebrity fashion on their blog, Go Fug Yourself, the fact that ad sales on their blog now pay their salaries has not changed what they set out to do from Day One: have fun. "It was one of these inside jokes that we thought was going to just stay an inside joke,"says Cocks.

Part of it has to do with the nature of the medium: Blogging creates a direct connection between authors and readers, a conversation with distinct voices carried out in comments and e-mails and other blogs. Nakagawa wants to see how big that conversation—not to mention his business—can get. "It's kind of like, how far can you take it?" he says.

How To Build A MultiMillion Dollar Business, Teaching Others How To Use Computers

VideoProfessor.com

Seventeen years ago John W. Scherer sensed that video lessons are going to be all the rage. This is when he founded his Video Professor Inc, a multimillion corporation that sends out 250,000 packages every month and has over 5 million customers in US alone.

You know that John W. Scherer must be a very good marketer if he made Willie Nelson buy eBay trading course from him.

The core of his successful marteting strategy (not surprisingly) has been giving away free trial lessons. Company's intertal marketing experiments have demonstraged that a person who watched at least one trial lesson is 11 times more likely to purchase a course of interest (currently, the most popular course is on using Windows Vista).

In fact, the conversion ratio for Video Professor lessons are so good that John W. Scherer has rolled out several infomercials. Perhaps one of the reasons Video Professor customers find these lessons so valuable is because of Video Professor's unique "What-You-See-Is-What-You-Do" teaching technique, which allows users to follow the lesson step-by-step in the actual program they're learning. Plus, each lesson title comes complete with sections designed for beginner, intermediate, and advanced users.

How To Make Money Selling Tumbleweed Online

The lowly tumbleweed is a nuisance to most inhabitants of Western Kansas. The Russian thistle bushes are everywhere. They clog drainage ditches, pile up against fencerows, and have even been known to cause traffic accidents.

But the weed is blowing only good fortune to Linda Katz of Garden City, Kan., who is proving that you really can sell almost anything on the Internet. You see, this former real estate agent, who’s married to a roofer, sells tumbleweeds over the Web.

“It all started as a joke,”says Katz, 49. She asked her son to build her a family Web page so she could communicate with friends and give it the tongue-in-cheek name Prairie Tumbleweed Farm. Never mind that she didn’t even live on a farm, but in a subdivision. Nevermind that you can’t cultivate tumbleweed, which spreads its seed as it tumbles in the wind. For authenticity’s sake, Katz added a price list ($35 for a big weed, $25 for a midsize one, $20 for the small economy model)

Remember, Katz wasn’t looking for business, but it found her all the same, thanks to the power of Web search engines.

Orders started to pour in from all the places where people love Hollywood Westerns: Alaska, Austria, Britain, Hong Kong, India.

Japanese customers proved so eager that she has added a section to her Web site in Japanese. Movie and TV production companies in Britain, Finland, and the U.S. have ordered tumbleweed for props, too, including a $1,000 order for the children’s show Barney & Friends. A scientist from New Mexico wanted tumbleweed for research purposes.

Many of Katz’s newfound customers use tumbleweed to decorate their homes, even in lieu of the traditional Christmas tree.

During Katz’s first two months on the Web, the site logged 2,000 visitors. By mid-January, the number had grown to more than 56,000. Katz says she’s making about 30 tumbleweed sales a week, which suggests revenues of about $40,000 a year.

That may not sound like much, but neither are her costs. She fills orders by grazing Kansas fence lines for tumbleweed and buys her mailing boxes in bulk lots. For labor, Katz uses her five nieces and nephews to help collect the stuff, and she gives them a share of the profits.

“Isn’t the Internet a wonderful thing?” asks Katz.

The Bra Strap Niche

Entrepreneur Dao Tran-Boyd is hoping never to be strapped for cash again after finding the holy grail of business: a niche product.

Bra straps sound like the kind of idea that could get laughed out of the Dragon's Den but as Mrs Tran-Boyd, founder of Glamorous Bra Straps said: "The simple things in life are the best".

That maxim holds true in business and 18 months after its launch the company has been shortlisted by the Gift Association for its Best Gift of the Year Award.

Mrs Tran-Boyd, from New Malden, said: "We are absolutely delighted to be shortlisted, especially as we have been trading for just less than a year, but have already achieved a retail and wholesale customer base across the UK, Ireland, Channel Island, Europe and even as far as Egypt and Nigeria.

"Until now bra straps have been a fashion nightmare, but not any more."

She started making the items at home selling them at school fairs. When interest grew, she took the plunge and invested money to approach a wholesaler in China.

The company is now taking enquires from agents in the USA and Canada and has over 150 hand-made straps in its collection.

Having a keen interest in community and charities, Mrs Tran-Boyd is happy the straps have been a hit with breast cancer sufferers and she now hopes to use the product to further good causes.

"Its simple, but it makes women feel sexy and glamorous," she said.

AdultFriendFinder.Com - How To Make Millions With 'Adult Dating' (As In Dating For Sex) Websites

Warning! NOT SAFE FOR WORK!

http://www.AdultFriendFinder.com

AdultFriendFinder.com is for those who wish to find some pals with whom to “play” and for those who choose to share tales of their adult exploits with appreciative new amigos. It’s kind of like joining an x-rated country club.

Founded in 1996 by Andrew Conru and privately owned, the FriendFinder Network operates with a staff of more than 200 from its corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, California. The FriendFinder Network is the leading global online relationship network, allowing over 20 million registered members to confidentially and anonymously meet people with similar interests and mindsets in a safe, exciting environment. Last year revenue is estimated to be around 87 million US Dollars, with most profit coming from AdultFriendFinder.Com

So what's behind the success of this adult dating website? What strikes you right away is how much access is available to everyone regardless of membership level. Without paying, services like accessing member personals are limited, but still available to you. All those thumbnails of tits, ass, or cock scrolling by in the search results will peak your interest and start your juices flowing for sure. Just a titillating taste and you’ll probably sign-up for full service anyway. In the meantime, anybody can send a wink to show interest. Adding a profile to your Hotlist sends an e-mail displaying your crush on the other member. As a bonus, the popularity of a profile can lead to privileged access even for a standard member. Paid subscribers for an extra fee can allow free access to anyone, increasing the number of responses they get.

How To Get Rich Selling ... Aprons

Aprons are generally considered more of a fashion faux pas than fashion-forward. They're hidden in the backs of drawers and thrown aside in the presence of company. Helena Steele knew it wasn't always this way. She could remember when her grandmother, Jessie, would bake treats while clad in finely constructed aprons with beautiful patterns on them.

So in 2002, Helena and her daughter, Claire, formed Jessie Steele, a line of aprons meant to go far beyond the kitchen drawer.

When the mother-daughter team created their line of vintage-inspired aprons, their unique backgrounds proved to be invaluable. Claire, a former model and marketing executive, used her knowledge of fashion and marketing to promote the business, while Helena, an accomplished seamstress and the founder of Golden Gate Kitchens, a successful kitchen design company, helped with the design. Their mission was to create an apron that bridged the culinary/fashion divide, an accessory that could be worn whether buyers were making meatloaf or strolling down Fifth Avenue.

"We definitely feel that they're functional fashion," says Claire, 29, who helped Helena, 54, update the vintage apron styles and textiles for modern wearers.

Claire and Helena unveiled the aprons to immediate success. The vintage styles are a hit among home chefs, as well as hip retailers and boutiques, which have seen a growing demand for retro styles, from '20s flapper gowns to bell-bottoms.

Today, the aprons are sold at stores such as Williams-Sonoma and Sur La Table, which appeal to gourmet cooks, and at small boutiques, which cater to more stylistically adventurous clients who love to wear the aprons as a fashion statement.

The company plans to start offering hospitality design and to expand the boutique line to contemporary, traditional and urban themes. Projected sales for 2007 are $3 million.

Even in the midst of their growing success, Claire and Helena take time to appreciate the foundations of their homegrown business. "One of the ideas of Jessie Steele is to celebrate your family, your friends and your home," says Claire, "and that's an important part of what we're doing."

Lisa Saunders Story

http://www.shadeclothing.com/

Lisa Saunders had been a fan of Shade Clothing for about a year when she moved from Southern California to Calgary, Alberta. But in her new home, she had a difficult time finding Shade's line of shirts, which is designed to be both modest and stylish. In her search, however, she discovered a way to fill her own clothing needs and those of other women in Canada--by becoming a Shade Clothing personal shopper. "You need to feel strongly and passionately about what you're selling," she says. "I knew I loved Shade."

Shade Clothing began its personal shopper program in March 2006, but the program wasn't available in Canada. Saunders knew it could be successful there, so she contacted the corporate office and worked with them to get the program up and running, eventually becoming the first Canadian personal shopper in June 2006. She's also a hiring manager, in charge of recruiting and training new personal shoppers in her area.

For Saunders, 32, Shade Clothing provides the double benefit of giving her access to clothes she likes and letting her earn money while raising her two children at home. But her biggest challenge, she says, has been getting the word out about Shade. To target her main audience--women and girls--she posts fliers at preschools, elementary schools and women's gyms.

She also relies, of course, on word-of-mouth generated by her in-home parties, where women try on samples and ask her advice. These parties, called home showcases, are Saunders' main source of sales. Saunders can even host parties over the phone, allowing her to have customers in other locations and run her business while she travels. "You can sell to anyone, anywhere," she says. Though the parties are her main focus, Saunders can also make sales through open houses, internet sales and personal shopping appointments.

Saunders recognizes that her business is about more than just making a sale; getting repeat business and good word-of-mouth are vital to direct-selling success. "I want all customers to feel appreciated, whether they're placing a $30 order or a $300 order," she says. With that goal always in mind, Saunders projects 2007 sales will reach at least $60,000.

Sammy Hagar And His Cabo Wabo Tequila Empire

Sammy Hagar, former lead singer for the mega-band Van Halen, is renowned for his soaring vocals and stadium showmanship. However, for the past 15 years, Hagar has earned another reputation: entrepreneur. As the founder and front man of the 200-employee, Novato (Calif.)-based Cabo Wabo Enterprises, with about $60 million in revenue, Hagar is behind a top-selling line of premium tequilas, as well as a growing chain of tequila bars, aptly named the Cabo Wabo Cantina.

"Like many people, my first introduction to tequila was probably around the toilet," jokes Hagar, who at 59 still has the youthful exuberance of an arena rocker. "Still, I dug the salt and lime. It was a fun drink."

But in 1982 he sampled the good stuff—premium blanco tequila—during a visit to Cabo San Lucas, a small Mexican fishing village on the tip of Baja California. "It changed my life. I had the true taste of tequila, and I became a blanco freak," says Hagar. Thus a businessman was born.

Ten years later, Hagar opened his first Cabo Wabo Cantina in that same speck of a town, envisioning a place where he could drink tequila and play music when he was bored. "It was just an ego trip," he says. "The town wasn't even big enough to accommodate the idea."

In fact, his business manager quit over the project. "She thought it was the stupidest idea," he recalls. "She said I'd spend a half a million dollars, we'd get sued, and it would be a money pit."
Famous Friends

Although Van Halen and the band's manager also thought it was a lousy idea, Hagar got members of the band to come in as partners. Together, he says, they invested a total of about $400,000. The Cantina kicked off with an MTV party, forwhich the music network flew in 300 fans. But Hagar says that following the launch, business slowed to a trickle, and the village, little more than a ghost town at the time, couldn't support it.

"The guys in Van Halen got sick of it," he says. "We lost money for five years—about $40,000 a year—[but] that's pocket change to those guys.… They said the place was too hot, there were no telephones, and no TV. But that's what I loved about Cabo." So Hagar took sole ownership of the Cantina.

Then things turned around. Hagar brought in a new manager to run the bar. At the same time, Cabo San Lucas started to earn a reputation as a tourist destination. The surge brought new infrastructure, paved roads, and new hotels. And people began flocking to Hagar's cantina.

Before long, Cabo Wabo was out of debt and turning a profit. "We first made about $30,000 to $40,000 a year, and then we started making a lot of money," says Hagar. "I didn't give a crap about profits. I thought if this place could just break even it would be a great place to play." Soon, rockers like Iggy Pop, U2, and Guns 'N Roses began flying down to play at the little cantina.
Packed House

By 1996, Hagar decided he wanted to produce a premium tequila to sell at the bar. He partnered with the Rivera family that had owned and operated a distillery in Jalisco since 1937.

It was a tiny operation. At first they sent Hagar their handmade tequila in jugs, vats, and five-gallon gas cans. Hagar stored it at the bar in a little barrel and served it in porcelain bottles with cork stoppers.

"Every step of the way, this was organic," explains Hagar. "I had no intention of starting a tequila business. I just wanted this to be the best tequila in the world and sell it in the bar. Period."

However, Hagar's business continued to grow as Cabo San Lucas developed. In 1998 the town became part of the cruise-ship circuit. "[The cantina] was packed all the time whether I was playing there or not," says Hagar. And more and more people discovered his Cabo Wabo tequila. "It was way beyond my hopes and dreams. It just exploded, and I knew this could be a real business."

In 1999, Wilson Daniels, a top wine importer based in St. Helena, Calif., launched a spirits division and contacted Hagar about distributing Cabo Wabo in the U.S. According to Hagar, the company signed an order to purchase 6,000 cases of his tequila, which retails for about $50 a bottle. That first year they ended up selling 37,000 cases. Last year, Cabo Wabo sold 140,000.
Rising Spirit

What began as a hobby is now a serious business. According to Stephen Kauffman, Cabo Wabo's president and an industry veteran, for the past several years the company has seen sales growth of 25% annually. And he says Cabo Wabo is tied for the No. 2 superpremium tequila spot with Don Julio, behind Patrón in the U.S.

The brand is also sold in Canada, Australia, and Mexico, and there are plans for a larger global market push. This month, following his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Hagar introduced Cabo Uno, a $250 limited-edition reserve.

Kauffman says the company is also considering other brand extensions, such as a beer label. It already sells T-shirts and other accessories bearing the Cabo logo. And in 2004, Hagar opened his second Cabo Wabo Cantina at the Harrah's casino in Lake Tahoe. A third in Las Vegas is scheduled for 2008.

Cabo Wabo has followed the upswing in the fast-growing U.S. tequila market. Made from the spiky-leafed agave plant found in central Mexico, the distilled spirit, once considered a low-end party drink, has seen a renaissance due to an increase in demand for high-end tequilas.

According to Nielsen Scantrack and LiquorTrack, sales of tequila rose 12.5% in 2006, grabbing a 6% share of the total $58 billion U.S. spirits market—nearly triple the pace of overall spirits, which grew 4.5%.
The Worm Turns

A number of factors including the continued popularity of margaritas are behind the surge in demand. For one, an agave shortage in 2000 spiked prices, narrowing the gap between the cheaper and more luxe offerings. And many of the largest liquor conglomerates such as Diageo, Seagram, and Allied Domecq, as well as smaller boutique labels, have all recently jumped into the premium tequila business.

Eric Schmidt, manager of information services at Adams Beverage Group, an alcoholic beverage research outfit based in Norwalk, Conn, says that in the past few years many new brands have entered the market. According to his tracking, in 2004 there were 13 new entrants, in 2005 that number rose to 19, and in 2006, 40 new labels joined the party. To understand just how far tequila has come from the $7-worm-in-the-bottle iteration, Patrón recently introduced a limited-edition Gran Patrón Bordeos priced at $400 a bottle.

As for Cabo Wabo, Schmidt says: "Hagar has created a great niche. As far as the affiliation with Hagar and the party atmosphere, they've done very well. But on a volume basis, it's relatively small."

Being a huge corporate brand was never in Hagar's plan. Refusing to deploy a team of marketers, he relied on his grassroots rocker platform to spread the word. In 1999 he wrote the party anthem Más Tequila, and he says he always mentioned the brand in interviews.
Just Like Martha

Moreover, on tour with his solo band the Waboritos (he stopped formally fronting Van Halen in 1996), he created mini versions of his bars on stage featuring bikini-clad waitresses serving tequila. His annual October birthday parties held at the Cantina in Cabo San Lucas attract thousands of fans who party with Hagar free of charge.

This past March he hosted a week-long Cabo Wabo cruise from Los Angeles to Cabo San Lucas. Although tickets cost between $1,249 and $4,619, it was sold out.

Hagar says the secret to his success is that he maintained authenticity by turning his lifestyle into a business—kind of like Martha Stewart for the hard-core partying set. "I didn't want layers of people telling me what to do," he says. "I didn't want a CEO and a chairman, and a president and vice-president and head of marketing."

Instead, Hagar says he has a small group of people who work for him. "Before I made it as a rocker, I had a lot of executives tell me what to do to make it, and I never listened to them," he says. "They'd tell me to write a song like this or I'd never make it. But I did it my way. And the same thing here, many businesspeople were trying to convince me that to make this a great thing, I had to have a corporate structure and involve people who knew what they were doing. I don't believe that. I didn't want to make it like that."
Creative Decisions

Indeed, while Hagar says he could have rolled out 80 Cabo Wabo Cantinas by now, he remains cautious about diluting the unique brand experience he has created. He's thinking about launching cantinas in Orlando, Atlantic City, and Fresno, Calif., but he fears turning the lucrative tequila bars, which account for about 25% of his business, into a cookie-cutter chain. "I'm fighting with myself on this one," he says.

Right now, Hagar is content to both play the party and host the bar. "I like owning and operating a business," he says. "It's as creative as stepping on stage or making a record."

Of course, this is one businessman with a buzz.

How To Make Six Figures Being A Personal Trainer... Online

http://the-personal-trainer.com

Boyd Myers left home in Texas, and a solid job as a computer programmer with the Air Force, to become a personal trainer - and that's when his career really skyrocketed.

After joining the Air Force out of high school in 1994, Myers got stationed in Montgomery, Alabama in 1996. There, he spent so much time working out at Gold's Gym that the gym finally offered him a part-time job in exchange for a free membership.

Myers, now 30, said he was happy to help others with their workout, but soon, "people started asking me to train them on the side," he said, so he insisted he would help them free of charge.

Soon he was working with clients 25 hours a week while trying to balance personal training with his programming job in the Air Force. That's when he decided to get certified, Myers said, and start charging for the services he provided.

After being discharged in 2004 with an annual salary of around $42,000 and 10 years of experience under his belt, Myers decided to become a full-time personal trainer instead of pursuing a career in computers. "That's what I liked," he said.

But when General Dynamics offered him $350,000 to spend a year in Iraq as an independent contractor working on tracking program, Myers decided he couldn't turn down the opportunity. But he didn't want to put his budding career as a personal trainer on hold either.

Instead, he used his computer skills to build his business online. "I kept an online personal training journal," Myers explained. While in Iraq, He charged clients $300 to $400 a month to provide them with a full nutrition program as well as training tips and general advice via email and message boards.

And when the 12 months were up, Myers immediately returned to his wife, Kristen, and his personal training career.

With the money he made working for General Dynamics and the client base he had built up, he rented a studio in San Antonio, Texas for $2,500 a month and hired two full-time trainers.

That was "a big risk," Myers said, "I had never paid rent on a place or hired employees or anything before."

Again, he put his computer skills to work building a Web site and mastering key words and cues used by search engines. "When people search (online) for trainers in San Antonio, they find me."

"The first two months we were open, we grossed $70,000 a month." Now, Myers, who charges $75 to $90 an hour, says he brings in approximately $250,000 a year through his studio and plans to open another one in the area soon.

"My goal is to open 20 studios or franchise."

Blog That Makes $1000 A Day.

http://www.stevepavlina.com

StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $1000/day (updated as of 10/29/06). I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there. Would you like to know how I did it?

This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can. How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.

If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.

This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.

If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.

Web savvy

What do I mean by web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

* blog publishing software
* HTML/CSS
* blog comments (and comment spam)
* RSS/syndication
* feed aggregators
* pings
* trackbacks
* full vs. partial feeds
* blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
* search engines
* search engine optimization (SEO)
* page rank
* social bookmarking
* tagging
* contextual advertising
* affiliate programs
* traffic statistics
* email

Optional: podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.

If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list. Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into. You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.

A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking. And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month. Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.

This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely.

Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it. To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work. I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.

Thriving on change

Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.

The blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out. Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned. And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.

I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself. But I learned to love this insane pace. If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too. And people who only do this part-time will be very confused. If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up. So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high. Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur. This is what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea. Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game. Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous. Let it inspire you instead.

What’s your overall income-generation strategy?

I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.

Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. An initial target goal I used when I first started this site was $3000 per month. It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $3000 is enough income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances. I reached that level 15 months after launching the site (in December 2005). And since then it’s continued to increase nicely. Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain. It’s a lot more secure than a regular job. No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones. We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…

Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year and review it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed. It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.

Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.

When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money. I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective combo.

Traffic, traffic, traffic

Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.

Just to throw out some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million visitors and over 2.4 million page views. That’s almost triple what it was just six months ago.

Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).

When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first several months. I just focused on traffic building. Even after 19 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan. For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK. Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along.

Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people.

With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites. On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews. Earlier this year I was featured in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers. Journalists are finding me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about. These opportunities were not available to me when I was first starting out. Popular sites have a serious advantage. The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.

If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.

How to build traffic

Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?

I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there: How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog). If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later. That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors. No games or gimmicks.

There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.

Blog Carnivals. Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know). Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche. Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free. Submitting only takes minutes if you use a multi-carnvival submission form. Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.

In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month. You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog for free. Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff. I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much difference anymore. Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic. But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start. Plus it’s very easy.

If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong? Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right. Again, making mistakes is not the issue. Missing opportunities is.

Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?

Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:

Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.

Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this. It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.

Most mature people understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her work. I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development. To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work. If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything. What could be more fair than that? The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it. For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site. I’ve recorded 13 episodes so far. The podcasts are all ad-free. I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead. More income = better service.

At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy. Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it: “You know, Steve. Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.” Of course I’m aware of it. I’m the one who put the ads there. There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads. They’re effective! People keep clicking on them. If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something else.

I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.

I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads. First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free. I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.

If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at the 2005 traffic growth chart. I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then. For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa. You can select different Range options to go further back in time.

Multiple streams of income

You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On this site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all? Here’s a list:

1. Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)
2. Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
3. Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)
4. Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
5. Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books)
6. Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)

Note: If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date, then this list is likely to change. I frequently experiment with different streams.

Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too. Every stream generates more than $100/month.

My second biggest income stream is actually donations. My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too. It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal. So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish. It’s win-win. I’m very grateful for the visitor support. It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.

These aren’t my only streams of income though. I’ve been earning income online since 1995. With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles). And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous: VegFamily.com advertising, direct book sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense income, and probably a few sources I forgot. Suffice it to say we receive a lot of paychecks. Some of them are small, but they add up. It’s also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones. I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.

Automated income

With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.

I love automated income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers. And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.

Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s a really nice situation to be in.

Blogging software and hardware

I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.

The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site. Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the Million Dollar Experiment.

I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.

Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend Pair.com for a hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.

As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS). My web server is hosted by ServInt.net. What I like about ServInt is that they have a nice upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle. I have several sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.

Comments or no comments

When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort. It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane. Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.

But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of my best decisions. I wish I had done it sooner.

If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it previously: Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.

Do you need comments to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it actually helped me. Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks. If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.

I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building. Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog. Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it. The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results. After doing that my conclusion is this: No comment. :)

Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.

Build a complete web site, not just a blog

Don’t limit your web site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it. For example, the home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the blog, article section, audio content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is, so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.

Testing and optimization

In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you. So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself. Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show real promise.

A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads. It took about 20 minutes. They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive. If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.

For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different colors, sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating the current layout. It works very well for me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the gutter though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor layout into a better one. This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and optimization had a major positive impact. Many of my test failed and even made my income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.

It’s cheap to experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income stream in under and hour and then just wait a month and see how it does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it does well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you need to test things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here — you either succeed, or you learn something.

Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small

Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs VegFamily.com, a popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal. Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more. It’s all relevant to personal development.

Pick a niche that you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at all. I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject. I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.

Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience. Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors. It’s all about what you can give.

A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers. And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.

Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents. In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on. I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity usually yields better results than cleverness.

Posting frequency and length

Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more. I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now). That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value. I don’t believe in creating disposable content just to increase page views and ad impressions. If I’m not truly helping my visitors, I’m wasting their time.

Expenses

Blogging is dirt cheap.

I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil. Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll probably find many more gems in the archives.

My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year). Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit. This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.

The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account. A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction of total income.

Perks

Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.

My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound. If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.

Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are. In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person. I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week. I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.

I’m also using the popularity of this blog to set up interviews with people I’ve always wanted to learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.

Motivation

I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.

What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?

Blogging lifestyle

Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.

Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet. But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.

Naughty Million - BadFun.Com

http://www.badfun.com/

Given that BadFun is projected to hit $1.2 million in revenue before the year is up, there's no question that there's revenue to be found in selling items like the "On Fire Seduction Basket," which comes with edible underwear, sex position manuals and other unmentionables one normally doesn't find in a business article.

And then there are the other gift collections like the Ultimate Bondage Basket and Advanced Submission Basket. Still, Matthias notes, "There is absolutely no nudity or potentially offensive content on BadFun.com, which is what sets our shopping experience apart from other sites." She says that their store allows "women and couples to purchase relationship enhancers in a tasteful, mainstream environment."

While the revenue stream is surely nice, Matthias says that one of the most satisfying aspects of owning the company is "when our customers follow up with us and let us know that BadFun helped them to bring the spark back into their relationship."

Student Storage - Dorm2Drom Success Story

Dorm2Dorm was founded by college students, for college students. According to the company's co-founder, Matt Nelsen, Dorm2Dorm offers relief during a period of high stress – finals week. The service is simple: students order storage materials online, which are delivered a week before finals. Dorm2Dorm comes back a week later, when finals are out of the way, to pick up packed items and store them for the summer. When the new semester begins, the stored goods are delivered to the student's (new) dorm room.

Costs for a typical amount of storage are around USD 70 per month, including delivery of materials, pick-up, USD 800 insurance, storage and delivery. The company can also arrange shipping and long-term storage for semesters abroad.

Dorm2Dorm launched in 2004 at the University of San Diego, and currently serves 11 colleges and universities. Although it isn't the first to enter the student storage market, it prides itself on running a highly professional and streamlined business. The company has doubled in size every year they've been in business, and is actively seeking managers to expand to other universities, while controlling sales, logistics and customer service from a central office.

It's one of those businesses that just works: a simple service satisfying an enduring niche market, that's ambitiously run like a market-leader right from the start.

What You Get When You Combine Pez And MP3

In July 2004, Patrick Misterovich was a stay-at-home dad when he read an article featuring an entrepreneur who had turned Altoid tins into iPod speakers. The idea inspired the 40-year-old ex-IT administrator to make a list of other possible candies and electronics that could be combined: laser pointers, Life Savers, USB drives. But nothing seemed to fit until he noticed “MP3 players” and “Pez dispensers” sitting idly on his list like two lost souls waiting for someone to play Cupid.

Five minutes later, Misterovich was e-mailing Pez about licensing its dispensers to create a Pez dispenser-shaped MP3 player and was only steps away from turning his self-proclaimed “crazy idea” into reality.

“I knew it was feasible after five minutes of research,” says Misterovich, “but I had no clue if there was a market or how much it would cost.”

That weekend, Misterovich spent $50 on Google ads and created a short survey to test the market. To his surprise, everyone from toy collectors to anti-establishment teens was interested in the product.

But after waiting six months to finalize the license with Pez and stopping production at 1,500 after learning he would need approval from product compliance agency UL to continue with a second run, Misterovich started feeling as if someone had pulled the emergency brake on his sprouting home business.

“When you come up with an idea, and two hours later you have the company saying, ‘We’re willing to license you,’ you think everything is going to happen quickly,” says Misterovich. “But it takes time to make something.”

The response has been positive, and current sales are at $120,000. In 2006, Misterovich sold out of his origi-nal production run and received approval from Pez to go forward with the second edition of Pez MP3 players, which have passed UL testing and will go into production early this year. In the future, Misterovich also hopes to expand outside his online sales forum, www.pezmp3.com.

Says Misterovich, “It just makes me feel good that I came up with a product people think is cool.”

Great Spare Key Keeping Business Idea.

New Yorkers who have a hard time keeping track of personal items now have one less thing to worry about. For a modest annual fee, NewYourKey keeps copies of keys in a secure storage facility and can deliver them right away if customers find themselves locked out. Keys lost in a nightclub at four in the morning? No problem! NewYourKey will deliver spare keys within an hour any time of day or night, wherever a customer happens to be.

Setting up an account is easy. NewYourKey comes to the customer with its mobile key lab, so copies of keys can be made on the spot if spare sets aren't unavailable. Customers must present positive photo identification. For added security, profiles include just name, password and photo, so no address is linked to any set of keys in the facility.

Three levels of service are available, with prices beginning at just USD 35 per year for key storage and USD 20 for each delivery. Additional charges apply for customers who wish to store more than two sets of keys or who’d like to authorize a third party to receive copies when necessary. Commercial accounts also are available.

NewYourKey, which was launched just a few months ago, is a great example of a business idea built around the type of favour you might ask a close friend, neighbour or doorman. It’s a life hack that should appeal to both busy professionals and notorious scatterbrains, who will be more than happy to pay for the convenience and peace of mind. One to set up in every major city!

How Zappos.Com Became Leading Online Shoe Seller

After San Francisco Web designer Jon Adams searched unsuccessfully for a pair of dress shoes and some sneakers, a friend recommended shopping online at Zappos.com.

Adams ordered two pairs of shoes from the site. When one didn't fit, he exchanged them for another size and style. Then he purchased a third pair.

"It's super easy to order, and super, super easy to return stuff," says Adams, who spent about $215. "It's just such a hassle to go around to stores."

Not long ago, the idea of selling something as tactile and personal as shoes over the Internet seemed one of those dotcom-fever dreams. After all, you never saw the trendsetters on Sex and the City hunched over their laptops surfing for Manolos.

Today, though, online footwear is a $3 billion business, and Zappos holds a full fifth of the market. With 4 million customers, the Las Vegas company has doubled its sales every year since 1999 and is on track to hit $600 million in revenue this year.

So how did Zappos best such shoe sellers as J.C. Penney, the No. 2 online footwear retailer? With customer-pleasing policies like this: If the shoe fits, wear it. If not, ship it back - at no cost to you - because a huge inventory almost guarantees you'll find something else you like.

Zappos, of course, is not the first dotcom to build a business on the back of free shipping (Amazon has done quite nicely, thank you very much), but CEO Tony Hsieh's big idea was to also make the return process a competitive advantage. Customers are given a link to print out a prepaid return shipping label. Eventually, Hsieh says, "we want to be selling everything and anything with overnight shipping."

While customers love the fast turnaround and free returns, the shipping policy will cost Zappos about $100 million in 2006. In fact, only this year did the company turn profitable, earning a few million dollars.

Still, the policy "is a long-term customer-retention strategy," says Patti Freeman Evans, a senior analyst at JupiterResearch. On any given day, 65 percent of Zappos shoppers are repeat customers, according to the company.

The idea of hassle-free online shoe shopping was in Zappos's DNA from its founding in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn, a San Francisco marketer. Zappos (the name is loosely derived from zapatos, the Spanish word for "shoes") brought in Hsieh, then running a venture capital firm called Venture Frogs, as CEO in 2000, and he hired Venture Frogs co-founder Alfred Lin to be the shoe retailer's CFO.

Venture Frogs poured $1 million into Zappos. More recently, Zappos scored two rounds of funding, totaling $35 million, from Sequoia Capital in 2004 and 2005.

Of course, free shipping works only if you have a lot of merchandise to ship. Zappos's Shepherdsville, Ky., warehouse boasts an inventory of almost 3.2 million items, mainly shoes, representing more than 950 brands. Features like 24-hour customer service and a 365-day return policy have further ensured that Zappos shoppers - about 40 percent male, incidentally - walk away happy.

With rivals like Shoebuy.com, the second-largest Internet-only footwear retailer, and the recent launch of Gap's Piperlime online shoe store, Zappos needs to stay on its toes.

But Heather Dougherty, an analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings, says the online shoe industry is growing so fast that there's room for several players: "It's not a zero-sum game."

Marketing After Dark

Australian Passout Marketing is using nightclub hand stamps for advertising.

Inked on the hands and wrists of nightclub patrons, passout stamps are used as proof that someone has paid admission, is of legal drinking age, or can gain re-entrance to a club. Passout Marketing deemed this space too good to go unbranded, and has started working with venue owners and advertisers to stamp marketing messages on club hoppers. As they put it, Passout Marketing allows companies to "get their brand name right onto the skin of their target market".

Passout Marketing owns the rights to use the pass-out stamps of a majority of Australian nightspots, giving them exposure to thousands of men and women aged 18-32 every week. They currently cover over 2,500,00 people each year, and venues are given a cut of ad revenues.

The idea is spreading: The Cool Hunter recently featured stamp advertising in India, which was limited to a (very sensible) 'don't drink and drive' campaign.

Opportunities? This one's easy to set up. Start-up costs are minimal, and entrepreneurs that have connections to both nightspots and advertisers should be able to get up and running in no time. Sounds like a nice sideline for young ad agency employees.

Making A Living Selling Skateboarding Ramps

Illinois-native Jim Bell
moved to San Diego with big dreams of working in the skateboard industry. After a string of sales jobs with several skate companies, Bell struck out on his own to put his own ideas for a business in motion. In 2004, Bell started Jim Bell Skateboard Ramps with nothing but the money in his pocket. Two years later, his custom-built skateboard ramp business is bringing in a quarter-million dollars in sales.

Bell began building skateboard ramps in his dad's garden when he was 14; now he's using his skills to build custom ramps in other people's backyards. Bell's built hundreds of ramps ranging in size from 4' x 8' wide mini-ramps to 40-foot half pipes and wooden bowls. His first store-friendly product, the U-Build-It Skateboard Ramp, nearly doubled his sales in 2006.

How To Sell A Burger That Has 312,000 Options

"I started the restaurant out of a desire to do something that was different from what anybody had ever done before," says Jeff Weinstein, proprietor of the Los Angeles-based burger joint, The Counter.

And he has. At The Counter, customers can order ultra-customized burgers for about $6 to $12 apiece, starting with a choice of beef, chicken, turkey, veggie, salmon or ahi tuna. Then they can choose from 10 cheeses, 26 toppings, 17 sauces and eight types of buns.

That all adds up to an astounding 312,000 options, not to mention the several kinds of beer available.

Indeed, this unique concept has proven so appealing that it's grown from a stand-alone shop to a soon-to-be national franchise in the space of just a few years.

Thanks to a fast-growing following, the Counter broke even and began posting a profit just three months after opening in Santa Monica in December 2003.

"We believe we're the first to do the premium burger, and we're the best at it," said Weinstein, the 31-year-old founder.

In July 2005, GQ magazine ranked The Counter at No. 15 in its list of "20 Hamburgers You Must Eat Before You Die." But things didn't explode until Oprah Winfrey's best friend, Gayle King, sampled every all-beef patty on GQ's list for an episode of the "Oprah Winfrey" show.

After the show aired this past February, sales soared to $245,000 a month, up from the $44,000 a month it grossed when it opened in 2003.

Soon Weinstein's success attracted the attention of Lou Gurnick, who had worked on the initial development of franchises like Midas Muffler, Domino's Pizza and Orange Julius.

"I was so focused on getting The Counter successful that I wasn't thinking about duplicating it," said Weinstein. "It wasn't until after I saw the response that it was evident I could expand."

Gurnick helped pave the way for Weinstein's partnership with Flavor Firm, a Los Angeles-based franchiser, earlier this year.

With a modern industrial setting and contemporary tunes, "the concept lends itself to be ever evolving," Weinstein said. "Some other concepts, like Fuddruckers, are stuck in the 50s era and they don't ever evolve."

Weinstein, who is a graduate of the Johnson & Wales University College of Culinary Arts, didn't know much about what it takes to take a business nationally, so he was eager to partner up with a more experienced team. "It made sense for me to piggyback on their structure."

Since launching The Counter's franchising program, the development rights have been sold to 60 restaurants, which are scheduled to open throughout California over the next three years.

Four to five restaurants are expected to open in 2006, followed by 12 to 15 in 2007 and between 20 and 25 locations in 2008.

Long-range projections call for 400 to 600 restaurants across the country.

Weinstein is also contemplating opening another spot himself in Las Vegas.

"When I started The Counter, I just had thoughts of making enough money to support my wife and me," Weinstein said. But now, "watching the growth is the best part - seeing people who believe in it and are willing to back it."

How To Run A Multimillion Dollar Massage Franchise

http://www.massageenvy.com/

David and Anne Glover, 48 and 46, respectively, recently opened their fourth Massage Envy establishment in Houston.

Beginnings: The Glovers met when they were both working at the accounting firm Arthur Andersen in the early 1980s. David and Anne fell in love, got married, had two children and assumed the traditional roles of married life. David eventually became part owner of a commercial real estate investment firm, while Anne was the primary caregiver for their children. She calls herself “the volunteer champion of the world--school, community, church, junior league. I enjoyed orchestrating high-level events. It was good practice for organizing multiple franchises.”

When David retired from his business in his 40s, he didn’t want to retire for good, so he and Anne looked into purchasing a franchise. “We could have gone into real estate, but the prices were so outrageous,” says David, “and we wanted to have a business that had cash flow right away--something that was a quick startup.”

Next Steps: “We went through business brokers,” says Anne, “and looked at a lot of franchises, some that were brand new and others that were kind of scary.” In their case, scary did not necessarily mean bad. Anne had been interested in a sandwich franchise, but once she saw all the food inventory and thought about having teenage employees, she changed her mind. The couple considered a gym franchise but figured it would be clobbered by bigger gym and fitness center franchises, and then they considered a tutoring center. “But we would have gone head-to-head with [competing] learning centers,” Anne points out. “I kept thinking, ‘Where is the niche?’”

They had similar feelings about a hair salon franchise they were considering. “It wasn’t a new business concept or model,” says David. “Basically, people are already getting their hair cut somewhere.”

Then they found out about Massage Envy, a massage clinic that operates similar to a gym--customers pay a monthly membership fee and make regular appointments or impromptu ones, usually getting massages the same day they request them, which is a rare occurrence in the industry.

Some risk-averse people would run, of course. It’s still a fairly new business, but the Glovers liked that aspect of it. “It was the only game in town,” says Anne.

And it has certainly worked out. Their three initial Massage Envy establishments alone bring in nearly $3.6 million a year.

Getting the Digits: The benefits of massages are not what the Glovers have to sell people on. The idea that the average person can afford to get massages routinely is. So, they were a little nervous about whether the numbers were there: Were there enough people clamoring for massages to make a full-fledged business out of it? “That was something we had to weigh carefully,” Anne says. “Do we want to get in on this young franchise? And we were jumping into the highest-rent district in Houston.”

But it’s in the high-rent districts that a massage franchise is likely to do well, and after a visit to the company headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, where they looked at figures such as the number of customers and the number of massages given every month, Anne and David were convinced the numbers were there. Says Anne, “We thought, ‘This is almost too good to be true.’ So we went with the assumption tha if we build it, they will come.”

And they did.

Of course, there’s also something to be said for running a franchise where you can get your own massage whenever you please. It may be the most relaxing sort of business you could ever own.

Wedding Webcasts As A Business

Webcastmywedding.net broadcasts weddings to a couple's friends and family unable to come over from (or to) far flung places. Customers need a video camera, laptop, and high speed online access. The company then charges USD 395 for setting up a live stream of the event, support for up to 25 simultaneous viewers (who are sent a url and password), and an on-demand archive of the wedding for 10 days. More streams and an annual archive account can be had for an extra fee.

Business is thriving, thanks to a powerful mix of tech and social developments: everyone is online; the infrastructure is in place (the web is finally about broadband and video: thank you, youtube!); more and more couples choose to get married in exotic locations far from most of their friends and family; globe-spanning immigration means family members literally live everywhere; while jet setting couples have friends in every major city in the world. Not to mention Generation MySpace, who, when they eventually choose to get married, will have virtual friends in every country with an online connection.

This is one of those simple, timely ideas that are ripe to be copied to virtually every country in the world. Perfect for minipreneurs, too. Make it ‘virtual’ like webcastmywedding.com, or go for the premium product, providing a fully equipped online video crew for couples who want the full deal. A match made in online heaven?

How To Make Money Selling Designer Barcodes

Japanese Design Barcode turns standard barcodes into appealing and engaging brand elements.

Following laundry services, supermarkets and coffins in our recurring 'everything can be reinvented' theme, come the humble stripes and digits that shape the ubiquitous barcode, as reinvented by Design Barcode.

Fifteen companies are currently using the agency's novel barcodes as part of their packaging design. The designs are clever and whimsical, from bars being picked up by chopsticks for a ramen noodles package, to a zebra carrying the black and white stripes on its back.

Some designs were commissioned by clients, while others are part of the agency's initial range of 200 designs created to display the format's potential. Exclusive rights to the latter can be bought for USD 4,000 plus a USD 400 annual license fee. The agency prides itself on zero instances of false reading by barcode readers (machine readability is key), and all barcodes are put through a battery of tests before being released for production.

Although Design Barcode has been reworking barcodes since 2004, the idea hadn't yet caught on outside Japan. That's likely to change after the four-man agency won major industry recognition in Cannes last week, in the shape of a Titanium Lion award.

Everything that is packaged reaches customers' hands with a barcode attached. Turning that mandatory element into something unexpected and playful is certain to make many customers smile. Surely that's worth USD 4,000 to most brands. ;-) Design Barcodes is working with Pacarc to bring the concept to the United States, but other markets still seem wide open. One for regional (boutique) design firms and advertising agencies?

A landscaping franchise bloomed into a livelihood for this grad.

http://www.uslawns.com

Being an entrepreneur was the furthest thing from Michael Carlo's mind when he graduated from college with an interest in computer programming. Now, 14 years later, Carlo, 37, is the quintessential entrepreneur. He's co-owner of six U.S. Lawns franchises and expects to gross $6.3 million this year alone--and he can't imagine working for anyone else but himself.

It all started in 1990, when Carlo's sister and brother-in-law asked him to invest some sweat equity in a franchise by running it for them. Carlo had never been interested in running his own business, but all it took was some sisterly persuasion to convince him that running a franchise would be a great opportunity. The family researched many different companies before discovering U.S. Lawns, a landscape maintenance franchise. It sounded like exactly what they were looking for: U.S. Lawns offered room for growth, low overhead costs, and a good year-round business in the warm Florida weather.

Fresh out of college, Carlo began running his family's franchise in Port St. Lucy, Florida. He built a clientele by knocking on doors and cold-calling potential customers for the first six months. Though his first year's salary was meager, business picked up steadily, and the franchise nearly doubled its business every year for the following three years. Eventually, Carlo invested $20,000 in the business and became the sole owner.

Carlo sold that first franchise in 1995 and purchased another one in Sarasota, Florida, before deciding to merge with longtime friend and fellow U.S. Lawns franchisee Todd Moerchen in 1998. Carlo met Moerchen, 40, during his initial franchise training, and they developed a close camaraderie. "It can get lonely and tough sometimes," Carlo says of being a business owner. "[It's helpful to be able to] get on the phone or visit a franchisee who's going through the same thing you are."

Together, Carlo and Moerchen own five franchises in Florida and one in Lexington, Kentucky. They are now the longest-running U.S. Lawns franchise owners and expect continued growth and success. "I'm very happy with the company," Carlo says. "They teach you the right way to do things, and I've never been denied help when I needed it. When I [have] raised my hand, they've always been there."

How To Become A Millionaire Planning Parties

Marley Majcher Story

Blame MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 for showing teens nationwide the extremes the super-wealthy go to for a child’s coming-of-age soiree. American teens, who number more than 70 million, want what’s hot at their parties--from bar and bat mitzvahs to sweet 16s, quinceañeras and other coming-of-age rites. Whether you start a new specialty, add teen parties to your existing event planning business, or specialize in peripheries like security or entertainment, teen parties have an angle for everyone.

Party planner Marley Majcher, who founded Pasadena, California-based The Party Goddess! Inc. in 2000, suggests walking the fine line between making teens happy and making their purse-string-holding parents even happier. “You have to be a really good listener and see yourself as a liaison,” she says.

To succeed, bone up on trends. Majcher, whose company brought in $1 million this year, notes that lounge setups are in vogue for teens. Because music and entertainment are paramount to any teen shindig, hooking up with hot DJs in your area can help you break into the market. And you’ll definitely want to market in areas with high disposable income.

Lending Goes Peer-To-Peer

Any industry making a huge profit margin off its customers is a good candidate for disruption. Banking is a classic case -- just think of the 19 percent interest you pay on credit cards and the 2 percent you earn on your savings account.

Zopa is closing that gap by using the Web to allow personal lending on a massive scale. The startup was the first company to introduce peer-to-peer lending in the United Kingdom 18 months ago and is about to launch in America. "What Skype did to telecoms, this could do to banks," says David Cowan of Bessemer Venture Partners, which contributed some of the $31 million in funding the startup has attracted to date.

Scott Anthony, a managing director of Clayton Christensen's consulting firm, Innosight, is intrigued by the disruptive potential of peer-to-peer lending. "Are there ways to loan amounts that banks won't lend because they're too small," he asks, "or to serve customers who would otherwise never be served?"

The idea is simple. People join Zopa online as either borrowers or lenders. The lenders proffer money not to individuals but to a pool of people grouped together because of similar creditworthiness. Zopa assesses the credit risk of the borrowers, pools the capital, and matches consumers who need money with consumers who want to lend it. Since Zopa is not technically a bank and doesn't lend money itself, the capital requirements to run the business are relatively small.

The average interest rate on a Zopa loan is 7 percent. For the lenders, that's much better than even a CD, and for the borrowers, it sure beats a credit card or most bank loans. Zopa takes a 1 percent fee, split between the borrower and the lender. So far, about 90,000 people have signed up, and more than $100,000 is lent every day (totaling more than $10 million so far). And only 0.05 percent of Zopa's loans have turned into uncollectible debts.

"We are moving from a consumer society of mass production to a society where we are defined more as individuals," says Zopa CEO Richard Duvall. Yet in banking, Duvall points out, "there are still enormous corporations controlling our money." Duvall believes that a nimble Zopa can trounce banks in assessing credit by gauging things that banks typically don't review, such as a person's eBay ratings. And he's injecting a social aspect into lending. Just as in a social network, lenders can read the online profiles of the people borrowing their money. "If I borrow from real people," Duvall says, "I'm more likely to pay back than if I borrow from a faceless bank."

How To Make Money Flipping Websites

Jermaine Jones Story

The 20-year-old aspiring producer is a hip-hop fanatic. Yet even though his locale is far more about Tennessee twang than beats and bling, Jones has found a way to pursue his rap passion and earn some easy cash without having to leave home--thanks to his clever exploitation of yet another method of making money on the Web.

Last August, Jones paid $1,000 to buy 411Hype.com, a website about all things hip-hop. He beefed it up--added some forums about fitness and health, for example--and managed to boost traffic by a couple thousand unique visitors, to 7,000 a month. Then, in late March, Jones put the site up for sale on a marketplace called SitePoint. He was bombarded with offers, quickly closing a deal for about $13,500. "I spent less than an hour a day on the site," Jones says.

For obvious reasons, the big acquisitions by News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, the Yahoo brain trust, and the boys at Google get most of the media attention. But every day, scores of small-scale Internet entrepreneurs are buying and selling simple-to-make, simple-to-run sites for thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars. These aren't just domain-name plays. The strategy involves spotting the potential of an existing website and then rehabbing it for your own portfolio or flipping it to someone else--and it's taking off, thanks to the froth created by high-priced deals like News Corp.'s $580 million acquisition of MySpace. "The feeling is there's massive growth to come," says SitePoint CEO Mark Harbottle, "that it's all just starting to explode."

While several places exist online to buy and sell already-built websites--eBay has a section, for example--SitePoint, a tech-focused publishing company, is the favorite of Web-savvy entrepreneurs. A year ago SitePoint added a market-place where, for a minimum of $10, people can list their sites for sale or auction them off. Demand has soared: In April, SitePoint added about 400 new listings, a figure that's growing by about 25 percent per month.

All sorts of sites are available--blogs, game sites, dating sites, entertainment sites--requiring varying degrees of expertise to run. You can build a site from scratch and flip it, or take Jones's route: Buy an existing site you think you can improve and resell. The key is to understand what you're buying. Start with the basics: See where the site pops up on a Google search. Amazon's Alexa.com ranks traffic. The seller will provide revenue stats, and you can scan message boards at SitePoint to assess a seller's credibility. And, of course, you need a plan.

411Hype.com, for instance, was a basic message board with various topics related to hip-hop when Jones bought it from a college kid who had never bothered to seek advertisers. At the time, the site was getting about 1,000 unique hits a day. To broaden its scope, Jones added topics he thought would appeal to his demographic, mainly guys in their teens and 20s. He spent time on the forums at SitePoint and DNForum, another popular site for small Web entrepreneurs, and posted threads saying he was looking for advertisers. That generated inquiries, and Jones sold some ad spots for $100 a month, quickly recouping his investment. He also used Adbrite.com, which sells space for many websites, to place ads.

Traffic steadily improved. Jones further boosted his ad revenue by signing up with Yahoo's Publisher Network and CasaleMedia.com, an ad network that works with publishers whose sites have no more than 10,000 monthly unique visitors. When he sold the site, it was earning $900 to $1,000 a month. Best of all, for Jones, nurturing the site was a blast. "The key is to be into the topic," advises Jones, who is now at work on an e-commerce site and will start college in the fall. "Then it's easy to figure out what your audience might want."

How To Become A Millionaire Digging Caves

David Provost Story

David Provost, has ably tapped the market for those channeling their inner Fred Flintstone. His Napa, California, business, Bacchus Caves, which he bought in 1997, builds actual caverns--underground and in hills. Initially, he was constructing them for wineries that needed climate-stable places to age their stock. But in 1999, he received his first request to build a private home cave, which can range from between $150 to $375 per square foot to create. Private caves now make up approximately 65 percent of his company’s market.

This isn’t to suggest people are moving their entire homes into caves; Provost has only one client who has elected to do that. “They don’t really live in them,” explains Provost. “People use them for other things, like a place to store artwork or have friends over. One customer wants to put in a yoga studio; another wants to store his golf cart.”

Provost estimates annual sales are between $5 million and $10 million. It’s a niche market, but a profitable one, and why not? Who hasn’t wanted their own personal den? “One client said it really brings him back to his primal roots,” says Provost. “Some of my clients are very busy people, and they describe their caves as the eye of the hurricane. They go in there, and their cell phones don’t work. It’s a beautiful retreat and a quiet place where they can just get away.”

With This Device You'll Always Make Your Payments On Time

Jake Frank and Stan Schwarz Story


http://www.passtimeusa.com/

When they first introduced their product, PassTime creators Jake Frank and Stan Schwarz received a lot of opposition to the car starter-interrupt devices, which they tried to sell to new-car dealerships as part of a payment plan offered to customers. Once they’re installed, PassTime’s products immobilize the car after a certain number of days if the owner does not make car payments on time.

“On the surface, we look like bad guys, trying to shut people’s cars off,” says Frank, 53. “But essentially what we’re doing is changing people’s behavior. Their car payment becomes a high priority--they can’t put [it] off for a day, or they lose one of the most important things to them: their mode of transportation.”

“We help rebuild their credit,” Schwarz adds, citing that the average delinquency on a loan in the sub-prime market drops from 30 percent to under 5 percent when a PassTime product is installed. The number of repossessions drops from 15 percent to less than 2 percent.

Schwarz, 51, speaks of his target market from personal experience. In the ’80s, he was unable to buy a car due to bad credit. Today, PassTime enables people in situations like his to qualify for car loans. By incorporating one of four devices, car dealerships and finance institutions can negotiate payment periods and offer higher-value vehicles while tracking their assets.

In early 2007, the company, which projects 2006 sales of over $15 million, will introduce a new product that incorporates GPS tracking into the standard starter-interrupt, code-based payment system.

How To Sell Something You Know Nothing About

David Carter Story

http://www.asbestossurveys.com/

One of the many remarkable aspects of the Internet is how easily people can use it to pretend to be something they aren't. There are, of course, terrifying results, such as when crooks pose as your bank.

But David Carter has taken that capacity for misdirection and made it into a legitimate way to make money.

For instance, Carter didn't know a thing about asbestos when he launched AsbestosSurveys.com - yet it sure looked as if he did. He wrote about regulatory changes in his native England by culling data from a government website. He explained what property owners needed to do to comply. He even posted local phone numbers for his "business" in London, Manchester, and Birmingham, each of which was forwarded to an answering service.

When inquiries flooded in, Carter steered them to an acquaintance who really was an asbestos surveyor. The requests were far more than one surveyor could handle, but Carter continued to book new customers.

"I told them there was a big backlog," recalls Carter, who is 47 and lives in Birmingham. "Then I said, 'Oh, God. What do I do now?'"

To Carter, there was really only one answer: Become a surveyor himself.
So with eager customers, Carter turned his site and follow-on properties into an actual business, called AsbestosServices.com. He took a half-week course, got certified, and teamed up with his friend. Today, once or twice a week -essentially whenever he feels like getting out of the house - Carter surveys a property, armed with a digital camera and notepad. The effort, he says, will net the pair about $350,000 this year.

Carter set up the site three years ago as an experiment to see what would happen if he dressed up a website to reflect a more serious and professional operation than it actually was. In doing so he stumbled across what turned out to be a clever way to cash in on the power of Internet search and marketing. The basic strategy: Build the customer base first, and then figure out how to sell to it.

How To Start Your Own Cosmetics Business

Maureen Kelly Story

http://www.tartecosmetics.com/

Projected 2006 Sales: $15 million

Maureen Kelly was working toward a Ph.D. in psychology when one of her pet peeves inspired an entrepreneurial endeavor. Each time she visited makeup counters in search of the right products, the makeup artists selling the makeup would leave Kelly looking beautiful, but also poorer and entirely incapable of recreating the look.

Feeling that the beauty industry was in need of a reality check, she set out to launch a line of simple and easy-to-use cosmetics in equally stylish and portable packaging for real women, who lack the time and expertise to spend hours primping.

The end result? Kelly dropped out of the Ph.D. program and launched Tarte Cosmetics in 1999 from her one-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment in New York City.

Entering an industry with no experience proved to be just the edge she needed. “If you come into an industry when you don’t have a lot of experience, you have more of a fresh perspective and you can think a little bit more outside the box,” says Kelly, who wraps Tarte compacts in leathers and fabrics. “You’re not bound by the typical tenets of what you can and cannot do.”

She scouted out laboratories and chemists to work with, relied on previous interior design experience for packaging ideas, and learned through trial and error how to market and sell her line.

She didn’t advertise, but after countless phone calls and careful selection of the right exposure, Tarte Cosmetics soon graced the pages of numerous fashion and women’s magazines and landed on the shelves of retailers such as Henri Bendel, Nordstrom and Sephora. In 2005, popular shopping network QVC offered Kelly the opportunity to officially launch her line in homes across America. The first hour-long segment resulted in the sale of more than 13,600 items and translated into an 8.5 percent increase in the company’s annual sales from 2004 to 2005.

Tarte Cosmetics has turned heads in the U.S. and Canada and will be hitting Europe next year, but Kelly believes slow and strategic growth is key. “You see companies that grow so quickly, and they’re here today and gone tomorrow,” she says. “I wanted to make sure I did the opposite of that.”

Sticker Junkie

Andrea Lake Story

At one time in her life, Andrea Lake tossed fiery sticks through the air at concerts to help her pay rent. Now she makes her living running several different businesses, but the balancing act is just as impressive. Delinquent Distribution, which she started in 1999, sells T-shirts and stickers printed with hip phrases in bulk to large retailers. StickerJunkie.com, started in early 2001, lets customers order small batches of stickers and T-shirts printed with any phrase they want. Between the two intentionally different business models, Lake covers all the bases and can ride through business upturns and downturns in style. StickerJunkie.com alone is on track to sell more than 3 million stickers this year.

You’ve got to have a bit of your own ’tude to think of selling shirts that say “I’m not a stalker, I’m just persistent” and “I used to have superhuman powers, but my therapists took them away.” Lake hearkens back to her teenage years to explain her company’s hip edginess. “I was your typical suburban girl who was mad at the world for no good reason,” she says. Now in her early 30s, she’s happily settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s not the first town you’d think of as a hub of industry. “For my own personal quality of life, I wanted someplace cool and laid back but also very creative.”

You might recognize Lake from her appearance on Donald Trump’s The Apprentice earlier this year. She didn’t win, but that doesn’t bother her in the least. Says Lake, “It was the most fabulous experience for me in that I realized how lucky I am to be doing exactly what I’m doing.”

These days, Lake is hoping to get funding for her companies, including a new venture called Luxury Wedding Packages. With so much entrepreneurship going on, the best way to keep up with her is through www.andrealake.com. “One day, Andrea Lake Enterprises will dominate the world!” she says, perhaps only half-jokingly. After all, she already makes $5 million a year.

$1 Million From Gardening

Lars Hundley Story

While caring for his own garden, Lars Hundley had a vision of protecting the world's gardens as well. So this former freelance writer put down his pen, bought six push lawn mowers for $100 each and began CleanAirGardening.com, which sells environmentally friendly gardening products, such as gas-free push mowers, organic fertilizers and electric trimmers/weed-eaters.

To cut costs, Hundley used his cell phone as a business line, built his own website and sold mowers from his apartment. He made his share of mistakes along the way, from overspending on ineffective advertising to stocking too many mowers in his apartment. When CleanAirGardening.com began to take off, the business initially suffered because it wasn't set up to accept credit cards. Hundley solved that problem by hosting his site through Yahoo! Stores and letting them handle the secure credit card transactions.

Hundley, who now works from an office in his three-bedroom home, expects 2005 sales to hit $1 million. Yet his focus is less on profits and more on finding new environmentally safe products and educating customers about the importance of conservation. In addition to promoting eco-friendly products such as rain barrels and reel mowers, his site offers a comprehensive list of websites that teach people about healthy gardening practices.

"I don't know how many of my customers I am converting to an environmentally friendly lifestyle," says Hundley, 35. "But judging by how many questions I answer from people who have never composted, collected rainwater or used a reel mower before, I think I am certainly making a difference."

The Ultimate Ears Story

Jerry Harvey Story

In 1995, while on tour with Van Halen, Jerry Harvey designed a custom-made earpiece for drummer Alex Van Halen. When news of his work spread to other musicians, he found himself filling orders as favors.

As a sound engineer, Jerry, 44, knew many musicians were frustrated with clunky headphones or amplifiers that couldn't capture the sound on stage or in the recording studio. "I miniaturized the technology that was being used in big rock 'n' roll systems," says Jerry. He then designed an earpiece custom-made from an impression of the musician's ear.

Mindy Harvey, 41, loved everything about her husband's new creation, except the fact that he was making them for free. The couple began asking for payments upfront to keep startup costs at zero, and they relied on word-of-mouth within the music industry to gain new customers.

Ultimate Ears' current high-end custom pieces can cost in the $900 range, but the Harveys also began targeting the growing iPod audience in 2002 with their generic, lower-priced consumer line, Super.fi. Today, the company has almost 20 em-ployees, and 2005 sales stand at well over $5 million.

How To Make 18 Million Dollars With A Simple Real Estate Site.

Steve Weber Story

http://www.z57.com/

Steve Weber always wanted to be part of something big, but he repeatedly saw opportunities, like the fax and PC markets, pass him by. "I told myself, 'I'm going to get on the front end of one of these market waves,'" says Weber, 42. "When the internet came, I knew that was it. I didn't want to miss out on the biggest opportunity in the history of business."

In 1998, Weber left his job as director of sales at a website provider to start Z57.com. With $2,000, a desk and a computer, he and one of his former co-workers, David Baird, 30, launched the internet marketing company out of a small office. They roughed it in the beginning, sitting on metal folding chairs, using a dial-up internet connection and having college interns help with cold calling. "It was duct tape and Band-Aids for the first year," Weber says, "but I wasn't worried. It was clear every business would need some sort of web presence."

A year after launching, Z57 narrowed its marketing services to the real estate industry. That same year, the company had its first $50,000 month; sales have increased every quarter since. Even during the dotcom crash, Z57, which remained privately funded and owned, managed to thrived.

Today, Z57 has four offices, 225 employees and 2006 projected sales of $18 million. The company offers website design, e-mail marketing and personal coaching to real estate agents nationwide.

Though home sales have recently slowed, Weber sees no end in sight to Z57's potential growth. "We've reached less than 2 percent of the real estate market," he explains. "There's tremendous opportunity to move forward."

How To Make Good Money Buying And Selling Vintage Guitars

When Aaron Madsen isn't installing garage door openers or recording aspiring musicians in his home studio, he can often be found poking around in pawnshops, looking for guitars.

That's how he scored a beat-up 1974 Fender Stratocaster last October for $400 that he resold a few months later for $1,000. All told, Madsen says, he made $3,500 in recent months buying and selling guitars.

And he hasn't even sold his most valuable pieces, such as the 1968 Gibson Les Paul Custom that's appreciated 750 percent to $8,500 in the five years he's owned it.

"That's something I'm hoping to put my kid through college with," says Madsen, soon to become a first-time father.

The idea of putting a kid through college on a guitar is not as far-fetched as it sounds. The value of guitars - electrics in particular, but acoustics too - is exploding.

Consider: A 1960 Gibson Les Paul, the model played by Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, sold for $192,000 in May at a Christie's auction in New York; had it been a year older, it could have fetched $250,000.
A collectors' market

The Vintage Guitar Price Guide, the bible of such matters, indexes a collection of 42 guitars it bought in 1991 for $150,000. Today they're worth $540,000 - almost doubling in the past five years.

The key driver of this sizzling market: baby boomers with spare cash and a yen for the playthings of their youth, especially the sexy guitars played by their idols.

The market is made up of big dealers, big private collectors, newcomers excited about the idea of guitars as investments, and enterprising guys like Madsen. At the high end are those prized Les Pauls, along with 1950s Fender Stratocasters (picture Jimi Hendrix) and Telecasters (Keith Richards), which have soared 50 percent in the past year and command prices in the $40,000 range.

Such high-end guitars have risen in price so rapidly that most investors have been priced out of the market. But the lower end remains a fertile plain of opportunity, and that's where Madsen tends to focus.

He monitors prices on eBay , though he's cautious about buying there. He relies heavily on the Vintage Guitar Price Guide, as well as the Blue Book of Electric Guitars and Gruhn's Guide to Vintage Guitars, which provides feature changes by year.

Such knowledge is crucial in this frothy and hence risky market. As an appraiser of instruments, Stan Jay of Mandolin Bros. in Staten Island, N.Y., says he often delivers "the bad news that a guitar purchased for $40,000 was worth only $4,000." (Here's a tip: Spend the $150 for an appraisal up front.)

A key part of Madsen's strategy is to try to anticipate tomorrow's in-demand guitars. A few years ago, Madsen noticed an upturn in the market for 1970s Fenders, guitars generally frowned upon because of the poor quality of Fender's mass production during that era.

He began scouring pawnshops, music stores, and Craigslist. He picked up three mint-condition Stratocasters - made in 1973, '76, and '79 -for a total of $2,200. Today those guitars could fetch about $6,300.

Madsen is also betting on a rise in the value of 1980s American-made guitars from Jackson and B.C. Rich that were staples of heavy-metal bands like Poison, because the teenage headbangers who couldn't afford them then will soon be able to. "I'm trying to scoop up all the ones I can," Madsen says.

Madsen plays a mean guitar himself, but you don't have to be a picker to mine the six-string boom. Still, it's critical to buy a guitar that sounds good and has a well-preserved neck.

Vintage guitars are functional beauty; they must be authentic and function optimally to increase in value. If you don't have the expertise to buy a good one, get help from someone who does. Otherwise you'll never get near the price in the guides, because a store won't pay top dollar for a guitar that doesn't play easily. And neither will Madsen.

How To Make Half A Million Bucks Pissing Off Scateboarders.

Chris Loarie Story

http://www.skatestoppers.com/

It's not easy stopping a herd of determined skateboarders from practicing where they're not wanted, but Chris Loarie invented a way to do just that when he came up with Skatestoppers. When these small brackets are attached to exterior walls, benches, curbs and more-the very places skaters seek out-skaters are prevented from practicing in those areas, and private property is protected from damage.

Loarie got the idea after hearing his police officer brother discuss all the complaints he had received from business owners about disruptive skateboarders in front of their establishments. Loarie designed the first prototypes in 1996, and throughout 1997, he focused on refining them to make them stronger and less likely to be broken by disgruntled skaters.

As he perfected the design and started getting rave reviews from business owners, city parks and school districts, Loarie added an artistic line with seashell designs and the like to make the practical product aesthetically pleasing as well.

Still, Loarie realized that although he was very popular with property owners, rebuffed skateboarders were hardly fans. "The skateboarders will say, 'Why can't I just skate anywhere? You're taking our rights away,'" Loarie explains. "To me, it's fairly straightforward: Somebody has a piece of property, and they don't want you there. It's within their rights to ask you to leave, especially if you're doing something that's disruptive or destructive."

Loarie is working with contractors to incorporate Skatestoppers into the design of new building areas. Now that company revenues are expected to hit about half a million dollars this year, it seems there's no stopping this entrepreneur.

How To Make $2 Million A Year, Setting Up Christmas Lights

Bob Martin And Larry Jones Story

http://www.brightideasinc.com/

Bob Martin and his employee-turned-partner, Larry Jones, couldn't help but notice the attention they were receiving as they put up their first client's Christmas display. "We had 25-foot toy soldiers, a 40-foot arch going across the driveway, a 36-foot-long Santa's Express in the front yard, and about 400,000 lights going throughout the property," says Martin, 45. The extravagant display even attracted the attention of the local media in New Lenox, Illinois.

That was in the winter of 1996. Martin got the creative spark for his company, BrightIdeasInc.com, when he realized most people dread the yearly task of hanging holiday lights. Confident that people would pay for the convenience, Martin launched the business from his garage. He spent just $2,500 at startup, purchasing supplies such as advertising signs, ladders, lights, timers and other equipment.

Thanks to free consulting help from his local Small Business Development Center, Martin developed a solid business plan and even got help with marketing and financing. By sponsoring the local TV station's toy drive and giving away free lighting displays through radio shows, he was able to score much-needed exposure in his community for next to nothing.

In 1997, BrightIdeasInc.com also began offering year-round landscape lighting services along with its seasonal decorations. Now with two showrooms and four warehouses in Illinois, the company projects nearly $2 million in sales this year.

Car Enthusiast Millionaire

Michael And Lewis Story

http://www.pfyc.com

Start-Up Cost: $583

After eight years of working for others-after he'd owned his own business-Michael Lewis got the inspiration to start PFYC.com. The car enthusiast had been chatting on a Pontiac Grand Prix community Web site when he met Brian Marks, 28, and the two commiserated about the difficulty of finding specialty car parts. Both had jobs in the tech industry at the time, yet they wanted to launch a Web site to meet car hobbyists' needs. Says Lewis, 42, "We had this idea we could do this with little risk because we could use the Internet as our catalog."

The partners started part time out of their homes-with Lewis in Sammamish, Washington, and Marks in Raleigh, North Carolina. "We didn't even meet until we'd been working together for three months," says Lewis. Their earliest expenses were $55 per month for Web hosting and application fees for the Internet transactions and merchant bank account. To save money, they didn't stock inventory at first, but relied on drop-shipping from vendors instead.

In 1999, Lewis quit his job to devote himself full time to the growing venture; Marks quit his job in 2000 and still resides in North Carolina. Lewis credits outsourcing with keeping overhead low-even today, with sales in the millions, they outsource warehousing, distribution and shipping. "As much as you want to start with $2 million in capital, keep the day job, and get your toes wet," says Lewis. "Learn when the consequences aren't so high."

Small Houses Can Make Your Rich?

Jay Shafer Story

Bigger isn't always better. Just ask Jay Shafer, founder and owner of Tumbleweed Tiny House Company (http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com), who lives in a 70-square-foot freestanding home. No, that's not a typo-his entire house has less space than most people's bathrooms.


"I had a hard time finding a place that suited my needs without exceeding my needs," says Shafer, who built his first tiny house in 1997. "So many American houses are so huge-they're oversized for the actual needs of the occupants."


Longing for less space, Shafer first designed a 100-square-foot house that was recognized in a home of the year contest by Better Homes and Gardens magazine. Exposure from the award prompted Shafer to go into business-suddenly he found a market for miniature mansions. Today, Tumbleweed offers more than 20 floorplans ranging from 70- to 500-square-feet. Half the customers use the buildings as their primary residences. Others buy them as freestanding additions to their existing homes, for use as an office or studio.


"Almost no assembly is required," says Shafer. "The houses arrive in one piece. All you have to do is connect the utilities."


A bonus to living so little: It forces you to be neater, says Shafer, who even works out of his 70-square-foot abode. Downsizing also makes you reevaluate your concept of home sweet home.

$300 Hot Sauce

Nick Lindauer Story

Hot sauce enthusiast turned entrepreneur Nick Lindauer is on fire. In 2001, while still in college, he launched the online store Sweat 'N Spice out of his Springfield (Ore.) apartment. He sold a few dozen types of hot sauces, packaged each order by hand, and shipped everything from his local post office, barely eking out a profit during his first year of operation.


Today, Lindauer sells over a thousand products from some 300 manufacturers. His inventory goes beyond sauces to include seasonings, relishes, and snacks with clever names, oddly-shaped collectible bottles, celebrity-endorsed offerings, along with concoctions that are so blisteringly hot customers must sign a liability waiver upon purchase.


Prices run from $4 for El Yucateco brand sauces to $300 for hand-signed, limited-edition bottles of Blair's 16 Million Reserve, the hottest chili powder extract known to man. Lindauer and his two full-time employees operate out of a Midtown office in New York City. In 2005, the business grossed around $130,000. He forecasts $200,000 in 2006.


Lindauer says he owes much of his success to his blog (http://www.hotsauceblog.com/) where he dubs himself "Sultan of Sauces," and offers the hot sauce community news, reviews, recipes, contests, and interviews with prominent vendors.


He explains that the blog is a separate entity from his online shop—it has its own domain name and advertising—but it helps build his credibility and drives traffic to his store through a few strategically placed links on its navigation bar. Lindauer also establishes relationships with many of his vendors in person at industry events and helps in the creation of smaller manufacturers' sauces before they go to market.


Making a living from hot sauce wasn't his original goal, says Lindauer, a longtime champion of spicy foods and an avid collector of exotic hot sauces. The whole enterprise was more a labor of love. "I got really into collecting and decided if I'm doing this, there's got to be other people out there doing it," he says. He figured they'd want a place to trade opinions, and perhaps order a hard-to-find bottle.


Lindauer was right. At industry gatherings like the annual National Fiery Foods and Barbeque Show, in Albuquerque, N.M., he discovered a subculture of superhuman eaters who call themselves "chileheads;" a class of connoisseurs with a passion for rare and intense hot sauces.


Lindauer felt right at home. He had also stumbled onto an industry that is worth close to $2 billion, according to the estimate of leading spicy foods authority Dave DeWitt, editor of Fiery-Foods & BBQ magazine.


Lindauer is now making plans to open a brick-and-mortar shop, even though he and experts in the industry acknowledge that the niche market is too small to make it a sure success. "You've got to sell a lot of hot sauce to pay rent in Manhattan," says Dave Hirschkop, owner of hot sauce and specialty foods manufacturer Dave's Gourmet, one of Sweat 'N Spice's premier brands.

How To Sell $1.2 Million Worth Of Product In 40 Minutes

Denis Simioni Story

http://www.ojonhaircare.com/

Denis Simioni, 38, had owned an advertising and graphic design firm for 15 years in his native Oakville, Ont., when he first happened upon a substance called "ojon." Seven years later that little word has transformed his life, along with the lives of thousands of indigenous Hondurans, who supply ojon oil to his hair-care company, Ojon. Simioni, whose company employs 32 people full-time and projects $40 million in sales this year, says managing an operation with employees spread all over the globe is both exhausting and rewarding.

Here is his story:

How did you go from advertising to hair care?

My ad agency specialized in the beauty industry, so I learned all about launching a brand in this industry. One Saturday my wife came across a little jar in the bathroom with something in it that looked like peanut butter. It had been sitting on our shelf for two years. She called her grandmother, who lives in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and is always sending us natural cures and native remedies. Silvana's grandma told us that the product was ojon oil she'd purchased from an Indian. Silvana's hair was really brittle and broken from swimming and coloring it, so she put some of this stuff in and with just one treatment the difference was incredible.

So you decided to figure out what exactly this mystery goo was?

We changed our vacation from Disneyland (DIS) to Honduras that year so I could track down this Indian. Turns out he was from the Caribbean side of the country, from a Mosquitia rain forest. I contacted a nonprofit group called Mopawi that helps preserve the rain forest and the indigenous tribes who live there. They agreed to take me to meet the Tawira people, whose name actually means "the people of beautiful hair." You could hardly get a better testimonial. What was even better was that I flew into the jungle and was traveling downriver in a mahogany canoe for 5½ hours. Suddenly, we started to see people who weren't wearing any hats. All the other tribes use hats to protect their hair from the sun, but the Tawira put ojon oil in their hair and don't need hats. I met them, saw the process they've used for centuries to collect nuts from the ojon tree and produce the oil. The women unraveled their long hair and showed me how beautiful it was.

Did you know immediately that you could commercialize this product?

Yes. It took several years to secure intellectual-property protection and collaborate on the formula with some skin-care manufacturers from Italy that I'd known from the ad agency. I had fallen in love with this company, Origin Italian, because they were all about passion and purity of ingredients. They didn't have any experience making hair-care products, but they had a laboratory and a boutique manufacturing facility and they specialized in organic ingredients. We formed a partnership with them covering manufacturing costs, and we self-financed the startup.

How did you get the word out about your new product, given how saturated the hair-care market is already?

I had a friend who had a relationship with QVC. I got me a meeting with them, they loved our story and invited us to launch our first product on Dec. 27, 2004, at 10 p.m. As soon as the show aired, we sold out our initial inventory and had a wait list of 3,100 units. A year later, on the same day, we launched our first one-hour show on QVC, and within 40 minutes we sold out $1.2 million of product.

Why has television been so successful for you?

I realized that TV is the medium we need to tell our story and the story of the Tawira. Being on QVC drives our sales month-to-month. We're now their fastest-growing hair brand.

The story of the indigenous people is key to your sales and marketing. Do people ever wonder if you are exploiting these natives?

Yes, we're always fighting that perception because of all the past exploitation. That's why we've continued to work through the nonprofit organization, whose president is a Tawira himself and speaks their language. Because we are buying so much product from them, at a price about 230% higher than what they used to get, we've provided full-time work for more than 1,000 Tawira in about 30 villages in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. We've also provided them with scholarships, safety equipment, and education. They have elected indigenous committees to negotiate with Mopawi and with Ojon Corp., mostly made up of the women who produce 80% of the oil. Now they are purchasing land in one of the larger villages that has schools and a hospital, so their kids can have better lives.

How much have their lives changed because of your company?

They are still incredibly, incredibly poor and their development is decades behind what we know. But they used to support themselves by subsistence farming and deep-sea diving for lobsters, which was very dangerous. The children used to dive instead of going to school. Now that each of them can earn about $300 a year making ojon oil (they made about $67 annually in the past), a lot of them have switched over to that. I'm looking into building schools in their villages. I want to do that in partnership with the government, so that they'll have qualified teachers and materials.

You could have set up an operation to harvest the ojon nuts and produce the oil with modern technology, bypassing the indigenous producers. Why not do that?

I fell in love with these people. They have absolutely nothing in the world, but spend a week with them and you'll see that they are always smiling, calm, and peaceful. It's difficult because of the language barriers, their lack of education, and their remote locations. There's no telephone in these villages, and everything moves slower there. They're not on any time clock. But they believe that I was sent by God to help them and they've put me on this pedestal. I feel it's my calling to live up to that.

The Most Incredible Record Company You Never Heard About

Andrew Rallo Story

Andrew Rallo was standing on a New York City subway platform in his nicest suit, waiting for the B train to take him uptown for an interview at a marketing outfit when he heard music in the distance. The guitarist across the platform wasn't much to look at, but his talent was obvious. "People just started coagulating around this guy," Rallo recalls. "They were talking to each other and smiling and giving him money. They were doing things that New Yorkers don't normally do." And so the idea for Subway Records was born.

For the next two years, Rallo worked as a technical sales engineer for an online advertising company while saving money and scouring the subway for musical talent. He finally launched his fledgling record label and Web site in the fall of 2002. His vision is to create a comprehensive search engine -- a "Google for subway musicians" -- to get their music heard and market its energy to the public.

How does a 26-year-old launch a record company with no experience, no marketing, and no capital behind him? Well, for starters, Rallo has always believed in his mission to bring that unique subterranean energy above ground -- he's committed to helping those who have a surplus of talent but no voice. And he knew he had to take advantage of the most accessible and inexpensive media outlet out there -- the Internet -- while tapping a product that markets itself constantly to the 3 million to 6 million people who ride the New York City subway every day.

Many artists on Rallo's label, like Lorenzo LaRoc, an electric violinist who has played the subway for years, already have their own promotional Web sites. They just need someone to work on their behalf. With Subway Records' backing, LaRoc was able to trade the screech of passing trains for the screams of Madison Square Garden fans. "Playing the halftime show for the Knicks game was a dream come true," he says. "And I got paid $500 for two minutes of work."

To book the performance, Andrew Rallo relied on the age-old practice of cold calling. "To me, it just made sense," he says, "Subway music and Madison Square Garden are the perfect match. I just didn't stop calling until I made it happen."

Believed to be the only search engine for subway musicians, Subway Records delivers its service in tiers. First, it gives musicians Web-based exposure by listing and marketing their music online. Most times, artists have already produced their own albums, and Subway Records sells them on their behalf. However, unlike traditional record labels, the Subway Records musician pays nothing for this service. For its cut, the company charges the consumer an extra couple of dollars on top of the musician's asking price.

Rallo also acts as agent, booking his artists' paying performances at gallery openings and other events for a negotiated fee, generating additional revenue. He's constantly networking to find opportunities for his musicians to perform, and many times event hosts find him via his all-important Web site.

The second tier comes after judging an artist's marketability. If Rallo notices that a musician is working hard to sell CDs online or they're driving a lot of traffic to the site, then he will spend more time and energy on the artist. He'll even fund production of an album for musicians he feels have the potential to sell enough CDs online to be profitable, and the artists take it from there. After all, they're constantly performing -- simultaneously promoting themselves and Subway Records.

Down the line, a select few will be raised to the highest tier -- into the hands of upper-level record executives, who may mold them into bigger sellers. Through his networking skills, Rallo has already seen larger outfits express interest in forming marketing and production partnerships with Subway Records.

Don Gorder, head of the music business/management department at Boston's Berklee School of Music, says Subway Records' model -- using technology to promote a particular niche -- represents "the wave of the future" in the industry. But he warns that the approach remains very much the exception rather than the rule. "We have yet to see a really hot, successful label marketed entirely over the Internet," he says. "But I think it can be done."

Rallo says Subway Records is in the black, and he confesses that much of its growth has come from simply filling a void. "No one else wants to do what we do," he says. "No one has been willing to work with these musicians because of the deep-rooted stigma they carry with them of being bums or beggars."

But Steve Ciabattoni, editor of CMJ, one of the most prominent magazines supporting independent music, says Subway Records shares qualities with some of the most successful indie labels: "They appeal to a loyal fan base because the artists all come from one community and are chosen because the people supporting them really love their music." Ciabattoni, who admits to missing trains after becoming so engrossed by musicians on the platform, adds, "I believe Subway Records will succeed if they keep that spirit." He had been keeping tabs on one of his favorite subway acts, a tribal percussion band called Mecca Bodega, when he learned of its integration into Rallo's growing network.

By the end of 2004, Subway will represent over 200 musicians. And the site's traffic keeps increasing: With no outside marketing, it garners 2,000 to 20,000 hits per week depending on the level of recent media coverage, and fans have purchased almost 200,000 CDs online to date. Rallo is also looking beyond the Big Apple, with plans to sign musicians from Boston, San Francisco, Toronto, and Tokyo over the next few years.

Still, the process remains rooted in simplicity. All subway musicians are subject to the same test: If people interrupt their commute long enough not only to listen but to fork over their hard-earned money, then Rallo knows he has found a winner.

If you think about starting your own independent record label, read Music Business Made Simple: Start An Independent Record Label

How To Make $100000 A Year Uploading CDs To iPods.

Catherine Keane Story

http://www.hungrypod.com/

Apple Computer's iPods are everywhere these days, and they're hungry. Just ask Catherine Keane, 24, who started her business, HungryPod, shortly after an acquaintance offered her $500 to load his CD collection onto his iPod. Keane took the offer and determined that with two more customers paying similar prices, she could launch a business for $1,500--enough to buy a computer that could handle large volumes of data transfer.

Loosely based on what its first client paid, HungryPod charges $1.75 per CD for the first 50 CDs, and $1.50 for each additional CD. Keane will pick up both the CDs and iPods at her clients' homes or offices in Manhattan for an extra $15--unless they have more than 100 discs, in which case pickup is free.

Keane, who interned at a top 40 radio station in Florida prior to starting HungryPod, also recommends music to clients based on their collections for a fee. According to Keane, 1 in 4 customers requests this service.

Thanks in part to a small story in The New York Times, Keane's advertising efforts on Craigslist and word-of-mouth, HungryPod has expanded to three employees and four computers, and has annual sales that exceed $100,000. Now others want to get involved, so Keane has hired a marketing/sales employee and hopes to start HungryPod centers nationwide in the near future.

Six Figure Business Setting Up Pajama Parties.

Melody Biringer Story

Women want to network with other women while wearing pajamas, getting spa services and shopping—at least this is what Melody Biringer, 41, found out when she founded Crave Party.

Inspired by a pajama party at a friend's home, Biringer got the idea to create fun business networking events for women on a larger scale—at fancy hotels and ballrooms with champagne and strawberries. She secured local spa professionals (massage therapists, nail techs and so on) and merchants to provide the pampering services and shopping, and charged women a $35 fee to register. Her first three nights of Crave Parties sold out in two weeks.

Thanks to word-of-mouth marketing, her parties have grown in popularity. "[It's] networking in your pajamas in a swanky environment—that makes it even more fun to walk into this place," Biringer says. With parties under her belt in New Orleans; Phoenix; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Biringer would like to bring the concept to every major city—and even create annual parties themed around events such as holiday shopping or the Oscars—to push annual sales into the mid- to upper-six-figure range.

Being Organized Can Make You $100000 Richer

Lisa Zaslow Story

http://www.gothamorganizers.com/

It was both an interest in and a knack for organizing that inspired Lisa Zaslow to forgo the daily grind of an office job to start her professional organizing business. Officially founding Gotham Organizers in 2000, this New York City dweller had a background in HR and consulting. While on vacation at a friend's home in 1999, she went looking for a napkin in one of the cabinets. "It was just a mess, with candles, Christmas ornaments, Easter things, soup tureens . . . and I rooted around and finally found a napkin. I looked around and said, I have to organize this," recalls Zaslow, 40. "As I was [organizing a cabinet] on this beautiful, sunny day, a hundred yards from the beach, I realized maybe this was the work that I was meant to do."

The more Zaslow learned about organizing, the more she liked it. She got in touch with her local NAPO chapter to learn more about the business side of it and started organizing for friends and family free of charge just to grow her skills. "I knew I liked organizing when it was my agenda, but I really wasn't sure if I would like it when it was [for] somebody else," she notes.

This is an important distinction to make in the startup phase of any organization business. According to Izsak, "There's a big difference between organizing for yourself and your family, and organizing for everyone else. Many people are not [conscious of that]." Because professional organizing is such a customized business, it's important for entrepreneurs to really find that right solution for each customer. Though Izsak notes that the proliferation of home makeover shows has certainly raised the profile of professional organizers, "They [also] perpetuate the notion that organizers come in, clean up, and [that] everything is OK." On the contrary, he says, professional organizers must work closely with clients to help them achieve their own ways of organizing.

Though it's not as personal as a therapy session, Izsak has observed the sentimentality that people often have about their things. "We're dealing with hoarders," he says. "They have psychological issues that are impairing their ability to make a decision." That explains all the boxes in the corner--people hang onto things because they can't decide what to keep and what to let go of. A professional organizer needs a keen eye for detail and a good ear for listening to his or her client's specific needs.

Zaslow's HR skills certainly helped her tune into her clients' needs. "There's often a lot of shame [about being disorganized]," she says. "But once they let you into their home, they're really grateful to talk about it to someone who's not judgmental." A unique challenge of this business is getting people who are perpetually disorganized to keep appointments with her, so Zaslow confirms and reconfirms with clients before each meeting.
She was doing HR consulting and organizing on the side until 2002, when she decided to go full time with the organizing. Her profile grew rapidly after an appearance on HGTV's Mission: Organization. After hearing in her local NAPO meeting that producers were looking for organizers, she submitted a few proposals. She was chosen, and the half-hour show profiled how she organized the home of one of her clients--a young, single guy in the city. After that, Zaslow positioned herself as the go-to organization expert for local media and has gained massive exposure that way.

Zaslow, like many professional organizers, charges by the hour-- although the amount varies per job. Izsak agrees that fees vary widely, depending on an organizer's level of experience as well as the nature of the job, although he points out that many charge between $50 and $200 per hour.

Even with her company growing and sales projected to hit $100,000, Zaslow still finds time to teach professional organizing to other aspiring entrepreneurs at an adult-education organization, The Learning Annex, in her area. It's her passion, after all. "[There's] an immediate sense of results," she says. "It's a dramatic change both visually and in your life."

Millionaires Who Started With Nothing,

Sanjay Parekh and Rob Friedman story

http://www.digitalenvoy.net/


Believe it or not, IP intelligence technology provider Digital Envoy Inc. was spawned from two serious sweet-tooths. Sanjay Parekh, 31, started buying candy from Costco and reselling it to his telecom co-workers when he struck up a friendship with Rob Friedman, 38, general counsel at the company and an Atomic Fireball enthusiast. Soon, their friendship moved beyond candy cravings, and they were bouncing around business ideas.

Parekh made an interesting discovery when visiting the FedEx and Ikea websites in 1999: both prompted him to enter what country he was in. "I thought that was kind of stupid," he recalls, and the extra step slowed down his home dial-up session. "So I architected a solution to that problem using IP addresses." Friedman agreed that the technology--which provides general information about an online user, such as the city, local demographics and type of internet connection being used, based only on the IP address--would help businesses. They launched Digital Envoy Inc. in 1999, bringing along senior finance manager and co-worker Dennis Maicon, 40.

Filing fees for corporate documents cost $100, and Friedman drew up all the legal drafts. An article on the Red Herring website about their business led to their very first client, Advertising.com (now owned by AOL). Since they worked from their homes, Friedman quips, "I negotiated that deal in my bedroom." They also hired an intern and Friedman's cousin to do programming work in the beginning.

After moving into an office in 2000, they hired three more employees. Friedman found $10 chairs, and opted for modular desk setups rather than expensive cubicles. In their newest office, they have cubicles, bought inexpensively from the office's previous tenant. When it comes to traveling to trade shows and to see customers, they've also found ways to save their Norcross, Georgia, company money, using slightly out-of-the-way but much cheaper flight options.

Digital Envoy now works with many major ad networks and sites, and estimates last year sales at less than $10 million. The company's latest product, IP Inspector Fraud Analyst, allows companies to fight identity fraud by verifying user identity in real time. They are also combating fraud with a product that analyzes whether an e-mail is really a phishing attack. Digital Envoy continues to grow, but in many ways remains the same. Says Parekh, "One of the philosophies we've always had is to do more with less people."

You'll Be Shocked To Find Out How Much Eyeglasses Really Cost

Murray Wells Story

Murray Wells was studying at the West of England University in Bristol when he discovered he needed reading glasses.

So he visited his nearest high street optician but was appalled when he found that his new metal frames, ‘essentially some wire and two pieces of glass’ cost £150.


"I was managing on a student loan and £150 was a fortune – half a month's rent. I just couldn't understand why my glasses were so expensive, and my curiosity led me to investigate further."


He began to call manufacturers, opticians and industry insiders but he was met with a ‘wall of silence’.

But then a disgruntled employee at a laboratory in the north of England gave him the lowdown.

“He talked me through the industry,” says Murray Wells. “And it turned out that my £150 pair of glasses probably only cost about seven pounds to make.”

Murray Wells was supposed to be hammering the books in preparation for his finals but instead found himself immersed in the glasses industry.

He learnt about optometrical testing, how the frames are made and the lenses are cut.

He discovered that the market is around 70 per cent controlled by just four high street retailers: Vision Express, Boots, Dolland & Aitchison and Specsavers.

But, most significantly, he leant that he could make glasses for a fraction of the price that they were being sold on the high street.


Murray Wells enlisted the help of some students at his university who helped him build the website and design the logo.

He then used the final instalment of his student loan and some money from his father to establish Glassesdirect.co.uk, they began trading in September 2004.

Manufacturers were initially reluctant to endanger their relationships with high street opticians but eventually they relented.


In a year Glasses Direct had sold 22,000 pairs of spectacles and Murray Wells believes that this has saved UK consumers an estimated £2m.

“People generally can't believe our Glasses Direct prices,” he says. “As the high street shops are maintaining retail prices at 10 to 20 times the cost price.


“What I'm giving people is choice, and they are delighted,” he says. “An average pair of glasses is manufactured for less than £7, so I charge just over double. Even with advertising and overheads, I still make a profit.”


His business has gone from strength to strength and he now employs 17 staff and turnover is around the £1m mark.

“It’s all been a bit of a whirlwind,” he admits. “But I have always been determined to get very big, very fast”.

To aid this expansion Glasses Direct are now seeking investment from Venture Capitalists, however he says that they are also seeking him.

“It’s been a lot easier than I ever thought it would be,” he says. “We’ve literally been getting new calls from potential investors every day. It’s wonderful and we’re in a very enviable position to choose who we want to work with.”

It’s not just a decision who to take money from. Murray Wells knows the next move is crucial.

“It’s not only about the investment, we need someone who will be helpful at board level and is experienced in dealing with big organisations, large marketing campaigns and has e-commerce expertise.”

Talks are ongoing, but Murray Wells expects a deal to be struck soon and says press reports of raising £5m “aren’t far off”.

A large bulk of the money will be spent on marketing.

“We’ve made massive strides but still only occupy 1% of a £1.7bn industry so we’re really still just a drop in the ocean. I want to move as quickly as possible as we know it’s only a matter of time before competitive entry occurs.”

The big players in the optical industry appear to have accepted Glassesdirect.co.uk is here to stay too – even if they’re not happy about it.

“They’ve changed tack a little and aren’t rubbishing us in the press as much as they were,” says Murray Wells.

Murray Wells remains undeterred by the high street’s desire to stamp him out, but is looking to shake off the David vs. Goliath tag.

“As well as marketing ourselves to the mass market we’re in talks with several major retail organisations and expect to announce a number of partnerships by the start of 2006.”

Subsequently, Murray Wells is strapping himself in for another 100mph 12 months and expects turnover to triple to £3m, and reach £10m by 2008.

How Knitted Thongs Helped A Couple To Launch Fashion Business

Vicky Prazdnik and Lori Mozzone Story

http://www.curliegirl.com

With so much competition nowadays, a small business needs to create buzz and excitement to survive. That’s exactly what Vicky Prazdnik and Lori Mozzone did in their startup fashion business Curliegirl


The duo designs and creates crocheted and knitted hats, bags and scarves, but it was their sexy crocheted cotton thong underwear products that got them lots of attention at the start! As Mozzone says, “The thong has gotten us a lot of attention in the past. In fact, we tried removing them from our website a few times to make room for new items, and without fail someone emails us asking, "what happened to them?" This has earned them a permanent spot on the site!”


Prazdnik and Mozzone, avid knitting and crocheting hobbyists, knew that they needed to create something beyond the standard fare of knitted hats and scarves for them to succeed as a fashion company. They stumbled on the idea of dainty crocheted thong underwear, and went on to create the design and develop the right prototype. Once convinced that they have the right design, they tested the market’s reaction by showing the crocheted thongs in a Valentine’s theme party in New York. Their product got a wild response!


Prazdnik and Mozzone work together in a New York company as web designers, and became fast friends. Mozzone took up knitting as a hobby and shared her newfound interest with Prazdnik, who in turned shared her skill in crocheting. As Mozzone describes their start, “Both Vicky and I are very creative people who went to art school. When you are an artistic person by nature, you need an outlet for it... So, Curliegirl was born out of a hobby of knitting and crocheting.”


They became passionate with their hobby that they soon started an informal group of women who enjoyed knitting and crocheting as well. The two then created the usual knitted and crochet products – hats and scarves – that got complements from their colleagues and immediate circle. “We used to do an informal knit/crochet group with our friends, but got bored with what we were making,” says Mozzone. “That is when Vicky started experimenting with making the cotton lingerie, which eventually turned out to be our signature product!”


The duo formally launched their company Curliegirl in 2003. Mozzone explains the name, “Curliegirl was a personal URL of mine (for my curly hair), and we started using it as a temporary website. People thought it was cute, and so it stuck.”


Slow but sure, Curliegirl has attracted a growing clientele. They have also expanded their product lines - offering hats, scarves, handbags and other small accessories in addition to the thongs. They also have some salespeople who help distribute their products to other areas of the country. Right now Curliegirl is sold in boutiques around the USA.


“Our fashion philosophy,” according to Mozzone, “is we make what we could see ourselves wearing. We also like our products to be practical and cute. We want our creations to be different and to make the woman who wears them feel good.”


At the start, Curliegirl was a two-women show, and Mozzone and Prazdnik used to do everything themselves -- from crocheting every single product to shipping the orders. Now that the business has started to gain momentum, things have improved somewhat to allow them to focus on other important aspects of the business.


Mozzone explains, “When the business first began we were a one-stop shop with us doing it all, and in some ways we still are. We started outsourcing to get our items made which has freed us up to do more marketing, sales, and everything else to make the business work. Finding a manufacturer was very difficult for many reasons – quality control concerns, distance, cost and minimums. We wanted to find someone who communicated well, had a fair price, and a reasonable minimum.”


Even with limited manpower, these two business savvy women have an arsenal up their sleeve: they understand the power of media in influencing the fashion business. In fact, Curliegirl has received a fair amount of media exposure and mentions, including interviews in publications such as Redbook Magazine, and product inclusion in fashion spreads of YM and Jane magazines.


As Mozzone says of their strategy, “In fashion, getting endorsed by the media is very important. For a small company like us, paid advertising doesn't do much.. But when a magazine editor chooses your item to feature in a photospread, or wants an interview to tell the Curliegirl story, that is far more meaningful to consumers and they react really well to it, both in feedback and in sales.”


While Curliegirl continues to make inroads in the fashion business, the two women are still taking their entrepreneurial journey slow. In fact, they are only doing the business on a part-time basis, with the two continuing to work full-time on their day jobs!


According to Mozzone, “It is extremely difficult at times to balance a day job, Curliegirl and our personal lives. Forget about "free time!" There's a lot going on right now for both of us, so we just do the best we can. We are lucky to have a wonderful, supportive husband and boyfriend who help us out whenever they can. If Curliegirl were to one day become financially lucrative enough we would consider quitting our jobs. But as I said we take it one day at a time. It doesn't seem necessary to put that kind of pressure on ourselves at this point.”


Two years into the business, however, their partnership remains strong. Mozzone says, “We both handle the majority of things, but balance each other out in areas where one of us is stronger, the other is weaker, and vice versa. We easily pick up where the other left off.”


Nonetheless, Prazdnik and Mozzone have lots of plans for Curliegirl. “We are considering expanding our consumer base and experimenting with baby wear, but that is something for the future. We'll see what happens, we take it one day at a time,” says Mozzone.


Their advice to aspiring fashion designers and entrepreneurs: Be persistent, and don't wait for opportunities to come and find you... YOU have to go and find THEM!”

How About A Few Million Dollars For Clubbing In New York?

Andrew Fox Story

http://www.clubplanet.com/

In 1995, this oft-rejected newcomer to New York City's club scene found a way to get past the doorman of every hot club he longed to enter--start a website offering club-goers free club reviews and information. The now-savvy Fox recalls his earlier, awkward days: "I showed up at a club wearing green shorts, and everyone was in black. The bouncer looked at me and said, 'There's no way.'"

Working on the website in his off hours at first, Fox chucked his investment banking job in 1997 to give Clubplanet.com (then ClubNYC.com) his all. Volunteers provided early club reviews, until Fox hired a full-time editorial staff in 1999. Then he came up with a new idea: Start a guest list on his site for access to otherwise hard-to-get-into clubs. By offering a discounted cover charge to those who both signed up on the site and arrived at the club before midnight, Fox helped enhance the exclusivity of the clubs as well as increase revenue. Club owners were dubious about Fox's concept at first, but when hundreds of club-goers who signed up showed up at their doors, the owners gladly forged relationships with the innovator and paid him a "bounty" for every head he brought in.

Fox installed a management team for Clubplanet.com so he could focus on two other businesses he was involved in, but he admits giving up control was a mistake. Upon learning of Clubplanet.com's mismanagement and financial woes, Fox engaged in a bitter struggle to regain control. He ultimately won, but the battle took its toll on the company. He was forced to lay off employees he had never met. With only two employees, Fox started back at square one, selling his other companies to refocus on his "baby."

Clubplanet.com has grown to include thousands of club listings around the United States and the United Kingdom, and now syndicates its content to Citysearch, newspapers, Yahoo! and other third-party clients. Fox also recently launched NocheLatino.com, an upscale, urban Latino version of Clubplanet.com, and is working on a version for the gay community. He's since expanded his empire to include a New Year's Eve event ticketing site, NewYears.com; an exclusive club access site, CoolJunkie.com; a ticketing company, WantTickets.com; and an offline event and marketing company, Track Entertainment.

How much money do these sites generate for Andrew Fox? Last year it was a cool 22 million US Dollars.

How A Lady Stumpled Upon A $100000 A Year Business Working On Sundays.

Debra Cohen Story

http://www.homereferralbiz.com/

After buying their first home, Debra Cohen and her husband faced the unenviable chore of finding reliable home improvement contractors. Fed up with blindly picking names from the Yellow Pages and waiting for contractors who didn't show up, it occurred to Cohen that if she and her husband were having trouble finding contractors, other homeowners in their community must be facing a similar predicament. This bleak reality sparked the creation of a unique service that has since expanded into a profitable cottage industry across the U.S. and internationally.

After extensive conversations with lawyers, business consultants, contractors and insurance agents, Cohen, 38, started Hewlett, New York-based Home Remedies of NY Inc. from her home in February 1997. This stay-at-home mom used a $5,000 loan, a computer and a refurbished fax machine to launch her part-time business. Right away, the response from homeowners was tremendous, and after three months in business, she repaid her loan. Her gross earnings in the first year were almost $30,000.

Today, Home Remedies is a contractor referral service that matches home-owners with reliable home-repair workers. The appeal to customers is that the company takes on the time-consuming task of locating and screening qualified contractors, checking to make sure they're adequately insured and licensed, and serving as a liaison between the contractor and the homeowner throughout the course of a job. Home Remedies provides a win-win situation for both parties: Services are provided free of charge to the homeowner, and contractors represented by Home Remedies only pay a commission for any work they secure.

At first, Cohen worked approximately 15 hours to 20 hours per week; she now works about 30 hours per week. Last year, sales for Home Remedies exceeded $100,000. Cohen earns additional income by selling manuals and packages on how to get started in the referral business.