prosper-online.com

So, you have discovered that perfect home-based business that is going to have prospects banging down the door to sign up…but you don’t have the money to invest. The investment requirement may be $1500, it may be $1000, it may be $100.

The point is that you have NO money to spare, if you want to keep a roof over your head and food on the table. This describes most, in today’s economy, but you are special because you are wise enough to realize that if you just keep doing what you are doing now, you are just going to keep getting poorer.

Now mind you, that doesn’t mean you can walk into your boss’s office, drop off your resignation letter, and tell him to pound sand just yet…that comes later. But, you know that while your day job will make you a living, your online business will make you a fortune. Right?

So the challenge is to raise the money to start your business as soon as possible. The methods I am about to teach you will do just that, PLUS generate recurring monthly savings that will become your advertising budget.

Step 1: Where is My Money Going Now?

The simplest and best way of making money is to reduce your costs. But you may already only be buying what you need! So, we are going to reduce our costs WITHOUT sacrificing the goods/services that we need. But first, what ARE our costs?

Exercise: Take out last month’s bank statement and credit card bills. Itemize each of your major costs. Your list may look something like this:

* Mortgage on house or cost of renting
* Car payments
* Health Insurance
* Car Insurance
* Homeowners Insurance
* Groceries
* Fast food/lunches out at work
* Telephone/Internet/Cable
* Gas

These are just a few. It can be frightening to see just how much money you are spending to keep a roof over your head!

So now that we know WHERE our money is going, let’s take action to divert more of it away from other people’s pockets and into our own. We will do that via…

Step 2: Competitive Bidding–Who wants my business?

It is simply astonishing how almost every company utilizes competitive bidding, and yet how few households do! For every item we listed up there, there are dozens, hundreds, or thousands of different companies who would love to have you as their customer!

Let’s make them compete against each other, shall we?

Exercise: Find your policies for Health, Auto and Home Insurance. Find exactly what your coverages are, and your premiums. THEN, go online to a competitive bidding website, fill out your information, and request quotes from dozens of bidders! I personally use LowerMyBills and E-Health Insurance (links are provided in the resource box below). Representatives from these companies will be scrambling all over each other to provide you with their most competitive quotes, especially if you…

Tip: TELL THEM that other companies are bidding for your business! No one wants the competition to get a customer, so they will cut their margins as much as they can!
Tip: Create URGENCY by telling them that you are only accepting bids until X date, at which point you will choose the most inexpensive offer that meets your needs!

You will be astonished at how much this will reduce your monthly costs. This is a service that I perform for clients, in exchange for a % of whatever I save them, and believe me that is a pretty penny. But you don’t need me to do it for you, you can do this yourself!

Savings: (will obviously vary from person to person, this is what I tend to see on average)
Savings on health insurance: $200 per month
Savings on car insurance: $100 per month
Savings on home insurance: $75 per month
First-month savings on insurance: $375
Ongoing monthly savings: $375/month

Wow! That’s a nice chunk of change right there towards your business. And your actual results may be much higher or much lower, but chances are that right now, unless you bid out your insurance annually, your provider is probably treating you like a 200-pound 4th-grader taking your lunch money.

Step 3: I Can Pay Less, to Save MORE?!?

Have you been reading the news about the economy? In an effort to turn around the recession, the FED has been slashing through interest rates with speed and vigor usually seen only in Japanese Samurai movies.

Take out that mortgage bill, and see what rate you are paying. 7%? 6%?

We’ll use an average mortgage amount of $200,000, and assume your current interest rate is 7% at a 30 year fixed loan. Ergo, your payment is $1,330.60 per month.

Do you have any idea JUST HOW MUCH money you can save by refinancing now at a lower rate?

With the Fed rate cuts, loans at 5% are easily available. Just that 2% drop in interest will lower your payment on the SAME LOAN to $1,073.64…saving you $237 per month!!
Let’s add that in…
1st-Month Savings on Refinancing at lower rate: $237
Ongoing monthly savings: $237/month

And you can roll in your closing costs to the loan, so you don’t pay anything up front, and STILL be saving this much (a few thousand over a 30-year loan just knocks off about $20 per month from your savings, which is already factored in above).

Step 4: Waste Not, Want Not

Now we are going to look at such a simple, obvious, and EASY way to save money, that never even occurs to most people.

What are you doing for lunch at work? Are you getting fast food, because it’s easy and convenient? If so, you are spending about $6-$8 per meal!

Or do you eat out a restaurant? That gets REALLY expensive, anywhere from $10-$20 per meal or more! For this example, we will say that you are like most of working America and you eat lunch at a fast food place, spending $7 per meal.

So not only are you clogging your arteries and getting poor nutrition, but you are spending $210 per month just on lunch!!

Start bringing your lunch to work with you. Make yourself a sandwich, or whatever you please. The groceries will add up to $1-$2 per meal, if that. Let’s say $2 per meal.

1st-Month Savings on Brown-bagging it for lunch: $150!!
Ongoing monthly savings: $150/month
Benefit to your health: Priceless!

And how badly do you REALLY need that $3 Mochachino from Starbucks every morning on the way to work? If you cut that out of your budget, there’s another $90 per month you save!

BUT I LIKE MY FANCY STARBUCKS DRINKS AND DON’T WANT TO GIVE THEM UP!!

Ok, fiiiine! Give it up for just the first month then. If you are going to be able to make $1000’s of dollars per month by starting your internet business, wouldn’t you be willing to make that small sacrifice?

In the words of Jim Rohn, “OF COOOURSE!!”

Step 5: Take Advantage of the Economic Stimulus

By now you’ve probably gotten the letter from the IRS about the Economic Stimulus Plan…you are going to be receiving a check for somewhere between $300 and $1200 in May 2008!

If you spend it on bills, it’s gone, and the bills will be back…with friends. That’s why you want to start your internet business in the first place, right? So that you will have gigantic loads of income streaming in again and again from your marketing efforts?

For this example, let’s assume you are married, below a certain income level, and have 1 child. Your tax rebate will be $900 (or possibly $1200, but let’s be conservative).

Ok, let’s recap. So far, we’ve managed to raise:

Savings on health insurance: $200 per month
Savings on car insurance: $100 per month
Savings on home insurance: $75 per month
Savings on Refinancing at lower rate: $237 per month
Savings on small luxuries like Starbucks: $90 month 1
Unexpected Tax Rebate Coming in May: $900 month 1!
Savings from not eating out for lunch: $150 per month
Total Savings for First Month: $1752
Ongoing Savings per Month: $762 per month

WOW! We are there!! You have raised $1,752 to start your business, which is more than most cost! Not only that, but you will be saving almost $800 per month…let’s take $400 of that and invest it our business as our Advertising Budget, and we will have LOTS of prospects coming to our site…and from there, it is just a matter of the Law of Averages to generate out your sales.

My Passport to Wealth business only costs $997 to get started, and an advertising budget of $350 per month gets you a professional Marketing Manager who does all your marketing for you, AND a personal sales assistant who calls all your prospects! I have included a link in the resource box to learn more about this hands-free automated internet business.

So that would leave an extra $752 in month 1, even above and beyond the cost of investing in your business…AND you would have ongoing savings of $412 per month.

Do you think you could find a use for this extra money that you raised?

“OF COOOURSE!!”

Marketing is the part of business that no one seems to like. Perhaps that’s because it’s confusing and made to be even more confusing when you begin to read books on marketing and its applications to the business world. So, are there any secrets that actually work and that you can actually apply to your online business? The answer is yes. There are three home based business marketing secrets that you can keep in mind as you begin this adventure into running your own business - and as you become a success.

Less is More

One of the things that marketing professionals don’t tell you is that you really don’t need to do as much as you think you do. By simply adopting a strategy of telling as many people as you can, treating each customer with respect, and then repeating this cycle, that’s going to bring in a lot of new business. Word of mouth advertising may not get as much press as it once did, but it certainly still works when it comes to smaller home based businesses.

You also want to keep in mind that these marketing secrets don’t require a lot of time or a lot of money in order to be effective. Something as simple as adding your website address to your emails is just as effective as running a commercial on TV and a lot less expensive to implement. Think about smaller ways to spread the word instead of bigger ways. Target only the customers that have already shown interest in what you have to sell and you’re certain to market for success.

More is Less

You also want to remember that a customer on the internet these days is accustomed to seeing a lot of advertisements, so they know when they are being ’sold’ something. Instead of focusing your messages on sales exclusively, try bringing the customer information they can use - informational articles, etc.

When you put too many advertisements in outgoing emails or you simply push your company too much, you will turn off prospective customers. Even if they are interested in what you have to say, the more you talk to them about the same things, the more they’re going to wonder what the ‘catch’ is and why they should buy from you at all.

Recognize that your customers are smart and that they WILL respond to you, even if you don’t tell them about every sale or every feature for your products. You just don’t have to beat them over the head with what you want to sell them.

Use Your Home Based Appeal to Bring People to You

By adding a personalized touch to your marketing strategies, you will begin to pull in more customers, almost without trying. So often, online businesses forget that it’s their placement and location that allows them to be unique. Instead of downplaying the fact that you work from home, make sure that your customers know it. Show them pictures of your office and pictures of yourself to make the experience more personal. This is a marketing strategy that works no matter what you are selling. Since people aren’t meeting you in person, the personalization will do the ‘talking’ for you, making a customer more comfortable with you.

Try adding a blog to your website that will introduce the kind of person you are and what you are capable of helping a customer with. Or you might want to include a video of yourself talking about your product or a personal story that relates to your product. The internet can be such an impersonal place, so try to connect with your customer more.

No matter what you choose to add to your website, if you can sell products available on other sites for a much lower price, you are going to do well. This goes for fashion, beauty, exercise, sports, etc. If you can find high quality products that can be sold at much lower prices, you will draw in many more customers than you could have with higher priced goods. For example, if you can find a way to sell organic goods and clothing for much cheaper than healthy food specialty stores, you can help those that want to be healthier, but can’t afford the higher prices of other stores.

Of course, fashion is still a hot seller, no matter where you are. If you can present high quality fashions on your website, you will attract not only the teenaged sector, but also those in their twenties and thirties - of both genders. Look to celebrity and gossip magazines to show you what’s hot and what’s not and then look for a vendor that sells the same or similar items that you can them turn around to sell for a profit.

But weight loss isn’t the only concern with it comes to health for customers. Exercise and sports are other areas where you can make a profit with your online business. For example, selling sporting equipment or products related to sports fans is still a big business. When you work with the team and their product line, you will be able to access thousands of fans who want to support their team with licensed products.

While it used to be that beauty was something that only women talked about, that certainly isn’t the case any longer. That said, women are still the consumer group that is much more likely to invest in makeup and skin care products, though men too are looking to improve their appearance. With anti aging face products, both genders can begin to reclaim their youthful appearance, which will help them feel more confident in any setting. Selling high quality makeup products and helping customers with their choices is a great business plan, as it allows customers to have the department store experience from the comfort of their home.

Everyone either wants to lose weight or wants to improve their health. We’re a society that wants to take care of our bodies and if we look good at the same time, that’s all the better. If you want to start an online business, you might want to focus on ways to help people lose weight or simply to improve their health. You can do this by offering fitness and health related products on your website or perhaps by offering eBooks that will help them make better health decisions. Try to find something that relates to a question or a concern a person has about their health - and then you have a viable and profitable business plan.

* In order to put ads on a web page, the webmaster inserts JavaScript code into the page.
* Each time a page with an AdSense tag is visited, the JavaScript creates an iframe and sets its “src” attribute to the page’s URL.
* For contextual advertisements, Google’s servers use a cache of the page to determine a set of high-value keywords. If keywords have been cached already, ads are served for those keywords based on the AdWords bidding system. More details are described in the AdSense patent.
* For site-targeted ads, the advertiser chooses the page(s) to display ads on and pays based on CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions, or the price advertisers choose to pay for every thousand ads displayed).
* For referrals, Google adds money to the advertiser’s account when visitors either download the referred software or subscribe to the referred service.
* Search ads are added to the list of results after a user performs a search.
* Since the JavaScript is sent to the web browser when the page is requested, it is possible for other site owners to copy the JavaScript into their own web pages. To protect against this type of fraud, AdSense customers can specify the pages on which ads should be shown. AdSense then ignores clicks from pages other than those specified.

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

A companion to the regular AdSense program, AdSense for search lets website owners place Google search boxes on their pages. When a user searches the web or the site with the search box, Google shares any ad revenue it makes from those searches with the site owner. However the publisher is paid only if the ads on the page are clicked: Adsense does not pay publishers for mere searches.

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

In May 2005, Google announced a limited-participation beta version of AdSense for feeds, a version of AdSense that runs on RSS and Atom feeds that have more than 100 active subscribers. According to the Official Google Blog, “advertisers have their ads placed in the most appropriate feed articles; publishers are paid for their original content; readers see relevant advertising — and in the long run, more quality feeds to choose from”.

AdSense for feeds works by inserting images into a feed. When the image is displayed by the reader/browser, Google writes the ad content into the image that it returns. The ad content is chosen based on the content of the feed surrounding the image. When the user clicks the image, he or she is redirected to the advertiser’s site in the same way as regular AdSense ads.

AdSense for feeds has remained in its beta state ever since its original announcement. Only selected AdSense users have been allowed to sign up for it, and no more users are being admitted to the program.

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.