Vendingmatic

About two months ago I took on a part time job. It was a quick way to save some money to start a new business. With my online business still making money and it does not need much attention the extra income from the job can be saved. There are some big goals that I have set for myself. The true entrepreneurial dream was for a real world business. With the cost of starting a real world business in a brink and mortar shop this dream had been placed on hold. As I realized that I am not getting any younger I started to dream up some ideas and get a plan in motion. The first step is to write a business plan and have a road map of where I want this business to go. Once I have set the goal I need to do all the legal work to make this a real business. The math I crunched brought me to a grand total of $35,000 to get started. This is the amount of money I need to pay rent and stock the business. As a new start up I will try to do all the work myself or ask some friends for help. The addition of employees would cost way to much for the first few month of business. As I grow the business I will add employees, but first I need to just get this thing going. The idea is to keep the business a bare as possible till I can prove that it will make money and then grow from there. There are many more steps to setting up a real world business. It makes my online business look so simple. With my online business it was very easy to set up and maintain with little effort. If anything I want to learn from taking this dream and turning it into reality. If I fail then I now know what I will need to set up another real world business. Many people say that the economy is tough and that I will lose my shirt, but that can be said about any type of business. The fact is that even in the worst economic times new business have been started and succeed. Now its my time to make a go of it. The fun part is that I am going to document my effort and share it on this blog as I move forward. Since the first step is getting the funding it might take a little longer before I can make and real headway in my effort.

The most difficult task for many adults is to manage money. If only schools spent just a little more time on educating children on the value of money. We need to make an effort to teach children at a young age how to handle money. It starts at home with the family and with support from the education system we can prepare the next generation to avoid getting into credit problems. There is not a single class on handling credit in high school, but yet there are many classes on subjects we will never use. Is the system set up so people will fail? Why is credit not made an important part of our educational system?
There are many people of influence that might not want this type of education in our schools. It wrong to not prepare kids for the future. If you have children you need to teach them about credit and the good and bad about borrowing money.

A great book to buy your child is One Cent, Two Cents, Old Cent, New Cent: All About Money (Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library)

THE CAT IN the Hat puts to rest any notion that money grows on trees in this super simple look at numismatics, the study of money and its history. Beginning with the ancient practice of bartering, the Cat explains various forms of money used in different cultures, from shells, feathers, leather, and jade to metal ingots to coins (including the smallest—the BB-like Indian fanam—and the largest—the 8-foot-wide, ship-sinking limestone ones from the Islands of Yap!), to the current king of currency, paper. Also included is a look at banking, from the use of temples as the first banks to the concept of gaining or paying interest, and a step-by-step guide to minting coins. A fascinating introduction is bound to change young reader’s appreciation for change!

The news on CNN today is that Verizon is running low on Google Android based phones. The HTC Incredible and the Motorola Droid have been selling at a very fast rate. It could be the customers who want the iPhone are tired of waiting to get it through Verizon and are willing to go with the Droid phones. With so much bad press for the AT&T network and all the drop calls it looks like Verizon is picking up many new smartphone users who just want to make a  call and get online without any trouble from the network. If Apple is planning a Verizon phone it will still be many months away from hitting the Verizon network. Even with the modified phone for the Verizon network it looks like Verizon users are very happy with Droid. There is also talk of a new Motorola Droid 2 which will further enhance on the already feature rich original Droid. It’s a great time to pick a smartphone and there are many choices, but many will still prefer the Apple iPhone on AT&T. Let’s see how much Droid phone usage increases this year. The Android OS has now appeared on all major mobile networks and is growing as users share their experience with friends and family.

The clear choice for bloggers and online marketers is to use WordPress for content management. The easy set up and the amazing number of plugins make WordPress stand out for web site creation. Trust me I have used many platforms to create web sites and WordPress still remains the easiest with a rich user experience.

The only thing you do not get out of the box is the right template. The templates or themes are very basic, you need to search online for better looking themes. With so many themes to pick all I wanted was one theme that I could use for all my sites.

With Socrates you can create 1000’s of web unique designs in just a few minutes. With all the available choices your sites will look unique and professional. Those that want to make money online already know that the more web sites you can create and get indexed by the search engines the better the chance of making money.

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What I love about Socrates is that they took the time to make tutorial videos that you can access for free. Once you buy your copy of Socrates you get instant access to the videos. It’s recommended that you start with the videos first and get an idea of what can be done with Socrates. There is even a section that lists out the top plugins you should install for your WordPress site. With back end SEO and fully search engine friendly features your web site will index higher.

The other key fact to using Socrates is that unlike free themes there is no advertising links on your site. If you have ever downloaded a free theme you might have seen at the bottom a link for offers from the theme designer. You want to avoid this as it can cost you page rank if Google thinks you are part of a link farm.

The clean design elements will bring out your content. If you are creating a business web site there is no easier method then WordPress with a clean theme.
When a visitor arrives at your site for the first time you want to make sure you have a great page for them to look at. It can make the difference from the visitor taking the time to read your content or just hitting the back button.

Learn more about Socrates Premium WordPress Theme Here!

There is a huge potential for making money online selling information products. The nice thing about selling information products is that you’re helping to solve a problem. Everyday millions use Google to solve some sort of problem. Now wouldn’t you like to get some of these searches to your web site? If you can track down some information products or create your own then it’s time to cash in. There are many digital download products that sell very well. People will pay for information that solves their problems. This is why you want to find a niche that you have a chance to dominate. It’s not hard to look around and get an idea of what people are looking solve. One method I like to use is listening to call in radio shows. If you listen you will find people asking for specific information. With a little research you can be the only one who has a detailed site selling the solution. If you can find a problem with a large enough audience then you can turn visitors into paying customers.
The site you create will have to provide information on the topic you are marketing. You should have enough information to make your site seem like an authority. Once your visitor realizes that you seem to know what you are talking about then it’s time to pitch a sale. You want the visitor to be asking all sorts of questions down your sales funnel. As they seem to be getting closer to their answer the pitch comes in. If you have done your job properly the user will convert to a sale. They want this information and will pay for it. With information products I like to build sites that get organic traffic. It’s better to create a site that is getting search engine traffic and brining in highly targeted users. If you set up a quality site Google and other search engines will reward your hard work.
In the past I found that creating a PPC campaign for information product sites brought in to many tire kickers. These were people that wanted the answer and did not want to pay for the solution. In my information product marketing test I had much better results with just natural traffic and very small amount of PPC adverting. You can try a PPC campaign at the launch of your site. This will help you make sure that users are reading and clicking thorough to the sales pages. Once you have a site that can convert just leave it to natural traffic unless you have discovered that your PPC campaign is providing a good rate of return. As long as your campaign is profitable keep PPC traffic on and monitor the traffic, but at some point you want to be getting traffic from as much natural searches as possible.
There is a great amount of money to be made from selling information products. In my tests my results have been mixed, but I am sure if I worked at building the best quality site my income would go up.
You can find many products to sell by doing a search for digital products and then joining the affiliate programs.

If I had not sold some of my stock portfolio last year I would be a richer man today. With so many projects on the go I need a little funding and I decided to sell my stocks. This was a mistake because had I held the stocks for another year they all doubled in value. The actual value of the stocks sold would have been much more then the profit I made on the project I was working on.

As an entrepreneur I took a chance on an idea and it failed. That is the cost of doing business sometimes you lose money, but you also walk away with a valuable lesson. As I rebuild my stock portfolio I am going to diversify into a portfolio of five stocks. The risk will be spread and the chances for growth in my favour. As I watch the portfolio grow in value I will not be tempted to sell. If I need the money I will pretend that the stock portfolio does not exist. Only with total commitment to my stocks will I see them grow in value. There will be stocks in the portfolio that I will sell when I have a chance at profit, but I will use the profit to invest in more stock. If I follow this method I should grow my portfolio and over time build wealth. The other factor I use when I buy stocks is to make sure the company pays a dividend. While my stocks wait to grow in value I might as well have some passive income to reinvest and keep growing. An education on stocks is also a must as I build my portfolio I am also trying to learn as much as possible.

Every little tip helps and by reading and watching business shows I will find the right mix to invest my hard earned cash. There are not too many methods that can make you truly rich, but the stock market played the right way can build wealth with time. It worth having some money invested in stocks and to be balanced have an equal amount in cash for those emergencies that life throws once in awhile. The lesson learned from my mistake last year was not to use my investment income for other purposes. Had I just kept the stock it would have worked out much better for me.

At the start of the year I kind of let my affiliate marketing efforts slip. With my Google Adwords ban and just not having the right offers caused a drop in income. The top offers that I was promoting thorough my landing pages were no longer available on the networks. As I had a good history with those types of offers it was difficult to re-tune the same style for different efforts. As I slipped further and further away from the goal I had set for myself I focused on my other income sources. With the affiliate industry changing so much in the last few months it is now time to get back on track and create winning campaigns.  There are many offers out there that can be profitable and with a little fine-tuning can kick start my road to recovery in affiliate marketing. The first step is to sort out the campaigns offered through my affiliate networks. Once I have a campaign I would like to work with I need to create the landing page. This is the most crucial step as the landing page is going to drive customers to the offers. On average I can spend a week on creating a winning landing page. Once I am happy with the landing page I start to look for traffic sources that would complement my landing page and the audience I am trying to reach. There are many different traffic sources to pick from and experience will tell you which ones will have the best response rate for your offer. If this last step goes well then my campaign will start to have some response. If the response is low I can play around with the landing page or try a different traffic source. There are many ways to get your campaign profitable and each affiliate marketer will have different methods that they use. The steps I take I have proven to work for the type of affiliate marketing that I do, but others might want to try something different.  The effort you put into your landing pages is key to making money, and I stress that testing is the best way to get the landing page to work.  Now that I can focus on my affiliate marketing business again I will document my next profitable campaign for a future post.

Having an online business means I deal with many documents and files. If ever my computer were to get a virus or stop working I would lose all my hard work. This is work that can not be replaced and I need a back-up copy. There are many web sites that I have backed up on an external drive, but still that is not safe enough. If the drive should get infected by my computer the files would also be corrupted. The only solution for backing up your work safely is online on a secure server. You hear more and more about working in the cloud and it the new way of doing business online. The nice thing about having your files uploaded to a backup service is that this is their job. The company takes every precaution to make sure your files are safe and available for you at any time. That’s why I started to use SugarSync to back up my files. These guys know what they are doing and I do not have to lose sleep over the safety of my hard work.

SugarSync isn’t merely a back-up solution; you can sync all your files such as Microsoft Office documents, photos, music, and media to all your computers and web-enabled mobile phones, instantly. Store and back-up your files on their secure servers and access them from any web browser, anywhere, anytime. Share files with your friends, family, and colleagues. You can even stream music live!

SugarSync Online Backup, Sync, Share – Try FREE for 30 days

This is one of the best back-up solutions that I was able to find online. It’s also a small cost to have this type of protection. They do offer a 30 day free trial which I would recommend trying before you subscribe. The interface is very easy to use and getting your files online is not a pain. In the past I have used other back-up solution and they converted files into some unknown format which I could not use if I stopped paying for the service. With SugarSync everything is stored on their servers as you uploaded. There are different packages based on how much storage space you might need. The starter package is a good choice to test the waters and see if this service is for you.

You can learn more about SugarSync by clicking here!

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Many online marketers like using WordPress. The WordPress platform is one of the easiest ways to get a web site and running. As an affiliate marketer I like to be able to set up a site as quickly as I can as you know time is money. Once I have WordPress installed on my server then I need to add great content. It’s a fact that Google and other search engines love WordPress and check back often for new updates. Once you have WordPress set up you are going to need a new theme to match your offer or page content. There are many free themes for WordPress and many top notch paid themes. Once you find a free wordpress blog templates site to download themes it just a mater of uploading it to the right folder in your WordPress server folder. Once upload you can change the theme of your WordPress blog and make it look more professional and match the offer you are promoting. One site I like for using to find new WordPress themes is www.wprex.com there are thousands of themes to pick from and the site has organized everything by category. This makes picking the right theme easy and effort free. If you are looking for a WordPress theme then I recommend you start looking at and pick and download a new theme today.

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If you sell online then you know that using Paypal can be expensive. The fee’s you pay to Paypal can cut into your profit margin. The other negative thing about Paypal is getting your account frozen. If you sell a lot online then you need a back up payment system. The alternative that I am using on one of my sites is called Alert Pay. This company is located in Canada and getting an account set up is quick and easy. If you want to accept credit cards on your site then you are going to need to get manually approved by Alert Pay. Other then the credit card set up time for the site everything else works like Paypal. Your customers can use the buy now button to make payment or you can request money by email.

The challenge is to get customers to trust this payment method. Many people have not heard of Alert Pay and might not bother to create and account when they check out of your store. You need to clearly mention on your site that you use Alert Pay and that they are 100% secure method of payment. Once the customer pays for the item the money shows up in your account. If you have a new account there might be a hold for about 10 businesses days. As I write this I have just completed the first part of the verification process and should have full control of the account in the next week. With so many shady things happening online Alert Pay wants to make sure that they know whom they are dealing with. As I change all my payment links on my site to Alert Pay I will have to send some traffic over to my site.

Once I have enough traffic I can compare the conversion against Paypal. It might take a few changes to the page to get back the normal level of conversion, but that is part of making money online. If I have to rate Alert Pay in this review I would give them an A+ for effort. The Alert Pay site is a gem to work with and getting the buttons on my site was not more effort then with Paypal. Overall I am very happy with this alternative to Paypal and hope to use them for more online payment processing on new sites I am working on. If you want to try Alert Pay it’s free to create an account and you can fund your account as easily as with Paypal.

Click Here for Alert Pay Free Account Setup!