Georgia Internet Marketing and Training Center

Easy Ways to Start Your Own Internet Business

Posted on 04. Apr, 2009 by Staff in Internet 101 for Georgia Businesses

1o years ago I sold my very first item on the Internet. It was a $9.95 t-shirt. In fact, when the order came through, I did not even have the t-shirt, nor the machine to make the darn thing. I had to go quickly place an order for some blank t-shirts, which required a $25 minimum order at the time. Then I had to ride up to Dalton, GA to purchase the print from F&R Sales which also had a $25.00 minimum order at the time I believe (it might have been $50.00).

Then, I had to go use someone else’s heatpress machine to make the t-shirt, and then I finally shipped it. This $9.95 t-shirt cost me a little less than $60 to make  and ship, but I was the happiest person in the world. It was at that point I realized I could make money from the Internet, and that was the beginning of my t-shirt empire, which I later sold to an outfit up North!

The moral of the story…

The Internet has leveled the playing field for anyone who wants to get online and start making a profitable living. Even though the economy sucks right now, it’s actually the best time ever to get online.

In fact, I’d encourage anybody with a job to start looking at some of the opportunities available to start their own business because quite frankly, no one is guaranteed their job next week.

What Kind of Internet Business Can You Start From Home?

I often tell people to start with something they already know. If you have a particular passion or hobby, start there first. It’s much easier to start with something you’re familiar with and when you do that, the passion generally shows through, and when it’s all said and done, you’re going to need that passion to get you through the rough patches.

I’m not going to tell you that starting an Internet business is very easy, because it’s not. It will take some time and dedication to get it going, but the rewards and benefits are well worth it.

Here are some of the things other people are doing to make money from their homes using the Internet:

MEMBERSHIP WEBSITES: If you have a lot of knowledge on a particular subject or if you know how to do something unique, then starting a membership site could be very profitable. Let me show you a real life example of this incredible concept.

A client of ours runs and operates a hugely successful home inspection firm in Atlanta, Southern Home Inspection Services (we built his site as well — thought I’d put in a shameless plug). Anyhow, he firm does well over $1,000,000.00 in home inspection sales annually.

Apparently, the average home inspector makes way less than $100K annually. So our client put together a membership site (we built that too), where he teaches other home inspectors how to market and grow their home inspection business.

To become a member, they have to pay a $79.95 monthly membership fee to get access to all of his trainings, tutorials, videos, business and marketing plans, and access to live monthly teleconferencing calls and webinars.

To date, he has nearly 500 members from all over the U.S., to include Canada and Australia as well (I’ll see if I can get him to do an interview with us). If you do the math, that comes out to roughly $40,000.00 of monthly recurring income (this doesn’t include the additional revenue he collects from his partner vendors, product sales, live workshop events, etc…).

His goal is to have 1,000 members by the end of the year, which equates to $80,000.00 per month!

He’s an Home Inspector and he took his knowledge to teach others how to get ahead. My question to you is this… what do you know or have inside your head that could be converted into a Membership site?

This doesn’t just work with home inspectors, it works with anything. There is a guy in the restaurant business who teaches restaurant owners how to market and grow their restaurant profits and he does well over 6-figures each month.

There’s another guy who teaches people how to use video editing software to make super high quality videos, and he charges $99/mo, of which I gladly pay each month.

Truthfully, this is probably one of the easier sites to get started with because the costs and technology has come way down, thus making this option almost affordable for anyone.

Sit down and spend an hour or two jotting down some ideas of what you want to teach others. There is a lady who has a product where she teaches people how to take photographs of butterflies and she does quite well!

DOWNLOADABLE PRODUCTS - ebooks, mp3 downloads, videos on demand: Back to my t-shirt example. After successfully selling tens of thousands of t-shirts online, I went back and created an e-book teaching other people how to start their own t-shirt business.

I wrote out the entire thing in Microsoft Word and then I converted it into a pdf file (which is the standard file people use to create ebooks). I then wrote a one-page sales letter advertising my book, which now sells for $27.00. In fact, click here to see the site for yourself. As you can see, it’s nothing fancy — the only people who’d be interested in this site are those who are actively on the Internet typing in phrases like “Starting My Own T-shirt Business”. My site comes up, and they buy my book.

Similar to a Membership Website, you take your knowledge/experience and write it out in the form of an e-book. Once you put it on your website, a person can come by and order the book from the site and after payment is received, they’re routed to a page where they can download the ebook.

You can also do this with mp3 files and videos as well. A client of ours interviewed a bunch of preachers who ran these super mega churches. He then packaged all of the interviews into a series called, “The Ultimate Church Growth” Audio Interview Series. It was an downloadable product he sold for $97.00.

The entire process is automated! There’s no shipping required and no inventory to stock.

It’s a beautiful thing… and that’s why I encourage people to look deep into themselves and extract out the knowledge they hold. Irregardless to how crazy you think your idea is, someone is willing to pay you to teach them how to do it.

SELLING PHYSICAL PRODUCTS ON-LINE: No matter what you’re selling, chances are someone is actively online at this precise moment searching for whatever you’re wanting to sell.

If you make a good healthy doggie treat snack, then you can likely have a successful business selling healthy doggie treats. If you’re into crafts, or perhaps you made a special fishing lure, there are people online who will buy your stuff.

I just recently discovered a guy in Adairsville, Sweet Baby Ray, who makes and sell guitars using Cigar Boxes. I had no earthly idea such a thing existed, but apparently, there are a lot of people out there looking for and buying the stuff… He runs his business from home as well and I’ll see if I can get him to do a one-on-one video interview with me.

Selling products online is quite easy and all you really need is a website, a shopping cart (depending on how many products you’re selling), and a way to accept payments online… It’s not at all difficult and we’ll get into this in another post.

You could literally get everything you need to start selling physical products within one day.

USING THE INTERNET TO SELL YOUR SERVICES: Nowadays, people generally turn to the Internet when they’re looking for a service. The Internet is the perfect medium because you have more space and opportunity to sell a person on how your service is different and how they could benefit from using you.

As mentioned earlier, this guy sells over $1 Million dollars worth of home inspection sales each year, here’s his site again: http://www.weinspect4u.com

Georgia Laundry also uses the Internet to promote their laundry pick-up and delivery services as well. In all of their advertisements, they direct people to the website to learn more information about their services. When you run ads in the newspaper or on radio, it’s impossible to sell your products/services in that small space, which is why it’s important you should try and encourage people to visit the website so they could get the ‘full story’ and understanding of what you’re offering.

If you’re selling a service and you don’t have a product, you’re missing out on a significant amount of business!

AFFILIATE PROGRAMS: You can make a great living promoting other peoples products and services, and that is exactly what an affiliate program is. An affiliate program is whereby you promote other people’s products and services and they pay you a commission each time a sale is made. Some affiliate programs pay out 10% commissions, and others pay as much as 90% commissions.

When we were selling t-shirts online, we had an affiliate program that paid out 30%. When a person who had a ‘religious/Christian’ themed website, they’d join our program and they’re giving a special link that belongs only to them. They’ll take this link and put it on their website and each time someone clicked the link they would be directed to our website.

If they purchased, the site owner would collect a commission. He or she is instantly notified when the order is made.

There are many people making a 6-figure a year income promoting other people’s products and services. It’s not as easy as most people would have you to believe, but it works and if you work it like a real business, you too can be successful with affiliate marketing.

START YOUR OWN TV SHOW: For the first time in history, the big networks like NBC, ABC, and CBS are no in control. With the Internet, many people are starting their own niche networks online.

Here are some great examples:

• Garden Lovers TV
• Crafter TV
• Baby First TV

You can even start your own “City TV” channel as well… whereby you take a video camera and report on local happenings in your area/city: Cherokee TV

I really love this video concept and will start to put more of my time into video moving forward. Here are some videos we shot for clients who wanted to talk about their services:

• NC Homes TV
• Bent Nail Inspections (see video in right column)
• Online Violin School

Starting an online business can seem overwhelming at first… but I’d encourage you to just get started. Many people waste many months and years waiting on the just the right time.

There’s no better time than the present. Get started today!

Online video’s popularity has grown exponentially in a short time thanks to video sharing sites such as YouTube. The increasing availability of high-speed Internet has also had a hand in making video so popular. Adding video to your website can greatly enhance your visitors’ experience.

Video can also be a tremendous asset to your website. It’s much easier than you might think to make professional-looking videos to showcase your products and services. Your site visitors can watch these videos at their convenience, and if they like them, they will often recommend them to friends and colleagues.

Here are a Few Ways to Instantly Use Video

Get Testimonials from Your Home Inspection Clients. There are flip cameras you can buy from Staples, Office Depot, or Wal-Mart for about $119 that will allow you to take high quality videos in a snap. After you record it, you slap into your computer’s usb port and it’ll do all the converting for you…

Here is an example of a video clip our client shot to promote his ‘tele-seminar’, with a $99 Small Wonder RCA Camera —

Make informational videos on topics relevant to your product or service. Click here to see a great example of this concept in action.

And here’s another example: Click Here (video automatically starts playing)

You can also get testimonials from your clients as well:

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Video Sharing Sites

YouTube has not been around all that long, but it quickly became one of the most popular sites on the Internet. The site makes it easy for anyone to upload videos to share with anyone with a computer who cares to watch them, and it provides viewers with a wealth of entertainment and education opportunities. Sharing your videos on YouTube and other sites definitely has some advantages.

YouTube’s immense popularity can potentially result in lots of people viewing your videos. If they find videos they like, they can embed them onto their own sites or blogs. That will result in an even greater audience, and some of them may choose to embed your video on their sites as well. You can see why some marketers love the idea of video sharing!

There are, however, some disadvantages to putting your videos on sites such as YouTube as well. One of the biggest concerns of marketers is that video sharing doesn’t require users to come to your site to view the videos. That means that while your videos may be wildly popular, they might result in very little traffic to your site. It’s important to give viewers an incentive to visit your site once they are finished watching the video. Alternatively, you can change your videos’ settings so that they can’t be viewed on the YouTube site or embedded elsewhere, but that will limit your viewership.

Another problem with uploading your video to a video sharing site and then embedding it on your site is that it will bear the logo of the video site. In most cases the logo is very unobtrusive, but it can still seem rather unprofessional, particularly on technology-oriented sites.

Embedding Video from Your Own Server

Those who do not like the idea of uploading their videos to sites such as YouTube can upload them to their servers and embed them from there. This gives you more control over your videos. There are, however, some drawbacks to this approach that you should be aware of.

One problem with embedding video from your own server is that it will usually require visitors to have a browser plugin in order to view it. The type of plugin depends on the movie’s file type, but they are usually free to download. The problem with that is that users often simply do not take the time to download plugins. They won’t have the incentive to do so unless they are really interested in the content to be viewed or they feel that they may need the plugin again in the future.

It’s also important to remember that video files are usually very large. Making them available directly from your server can take up valuable file storage space, and it can also drain your bandwidth. When you upload videos to a video sharing site and embed them from there, you use that site’s storage space and bandwidth.

Whether you should upload video to a video sharing site and embed from there or keep it on your own server depends on several factors. If you don’t mind having another website’s name pasted on your videos and don’t want to overtax your server, video sharing could be the best option. But if you want to ensure that users have to come to your site to see your videos and prefer not to provide free advertising for a video sharing site, hosting your own videos might be the best way to go.

At our Northwest Georgia Internet Marketing and Training Center in Adairsville (right between Cartersville & Calhoun GA), we have a mini-video studio and you are more than welcome to come out to our facility to shoot a video showcasing your products and/or services.

Here are a few videos we shot for clients:

1. Web Video Example #1 (video in top-right column)
2. Web Video Example #2 (video in top-right column)
3. Web Video Example #3

Contact us today…

Tags: ga home business, georgia internet business, homebased internet business, how to start a internet business in georgia, how to start an internet business, starting a business in georgia, starting a internet company