|pros • per • ly|

Now that I have revealed my #1 internet business idea, here is another good one that I like and use. It isn’t as good as the top one but it still is a legitimate money maker.

Create Your Own How To Guide

This could also be entitled create an informational product. The reason we push informational, is because it is digital and thus the automation of such a website becomes very easy.

People always look to the internet to find out how to do things. Truth be told, you can find pretty much how to do anything for free if you look hard enough. Here is the kicker; most people don’t want to take the time to look all over to find information, and they are willing to pay someone that has put the information together for them in a nice how-to guide. Their time is worth more than the price of your guide and thus you make the money.

I have capitalized on this principle for the last 5 years. One of the first websites I ever started (Lawn Care Directory – will be referred to as LCD) sells a digital product. It is a how to guide on starting a lawn care business. If people look hard enough a lot of the information is out there for free on the internet. But I sell a complete guide to starting this type of business, and since people can find it all in one place they pay me for the information.

How did you create a how-to guide? There are a few ways you can create a how-to guide that people will pay for.

1. Write it yourself. – If you have experience doing anything that you would consider your knowledge to be advanced then you can write a how-to guide. For example, if you are a dog lover and owner and have a lot of experience house training puppies, you could write a guide on how to house train your dog. You know how to do this so just write a step by step very detailed guide on how you do it. It’s that simple.

2. Buy the rights to one someone else has written. – After my brother in law saw the success I was having selling a how to start a lawn care business guide he decided that he would sell a similar guide in the pool cleaning industry. He had worked in this industry and knew the process well, however he didn’t have time to create the guide as he was in the military. He found a guide similar to the one he wanted to create and emailed the owner and offered to buy it from her. She sold it to him for $500.

He knew that based on the success I had achieved with my website that $500 was a no brainer. He was able to hit the ground running because someone else did the work for him. After 6 months he was making 2 times that a month.

3. Get the experts to write it for you. – There are two ways you can do this. The most common is to go to a place like Elance.com or Guru.com and create a project for professional writers to bid on. Just tell them you need a guide written on how to “insert your idea here” and then pay them to write it. You can also go to a local expert in your area and ask them to write it for you for a certain amount of money.

I actually got my guide written for me for free. That’s right, that wasn’t a typo. I got experts to write my guide for me for free. How did I do it? Well to be honest I didn’t have any experience in this industry. I emailed several business owners that I knew were successful in this type of business and I asked them several questions.

Most experts will gladly impart with the knowledge they have obtained, and my case was no different. Many of these business owners gave me step by step instructions on how to start this type of business and be successful. This is the guide I sell today. The information is legitimate, but it didn’t cost me anything.

Selling a guide like this is a good strategy because you can automate the process 100%. Search engines send someone to your site, they like the guide, they order it and then they can immediately download it. You personally are not involved in that process at all.

The Downside
The downside to this internet business model are as follows: There are emails that have to be answered and returns to process so this business model is not completely hands off. I’m not a huge fan of doing customer service but if you make enough money you can hire someone to do it for you. I still do it myself on LCD unfortunately. But I have set it up to where I probably spend an hour a month total working on customer service.

Pricing your guide
One of the most difficult decisions you will have to make is deciding at what price to sell your guide. The first thing you can do is look around and find some of your competitors and see how much they are selling something similar. If everyone is selling similar guides for $29 then you probably know that is a good place to start.

IMPORTANT: Don’t assume that other website owners know what they are doing. Just because all of your competitors might be selling the guide at $29, that doesn’t mean that is the best price. You could be leaving a lot of money on the table. For example, when I started selling the “lawn care business guide” on LCD I first offered it at $39 because that is what my top competitor did. After watching sales come in a making some good money I decided to go out on a limb and move the price up to $49. My total income went up and sales remained steady. A few months later I got tired of only being able to make $49.95 a sale and so I decided to make two versions of my guide, the basic and a premium. I packaged the premium with some extra stuff like some forms and advertising propaganda etc.

I put the premium at a price point of $99.95. Guess what happened? I doubled my income. Today, the premium sells twice as much as the basic kit does. The point of this story is to test your pricing until you find the price that will bring you the most total revenue.

Where to market your guide
A great place to market the new guide you have created is in forums that talk about the topic of your guide. For example, if you have created a real estate flipping guide, you should do a search on Google for a real estate flipping forum and then advertise your guide there. Don’t just start posting on the forum advertisements for your product. People see right through that and you will quickly be sent packing. Make good posts, solidify yourself as an expert in the industry and include a link to your new website in the footer of your posts.

If you want to spend a little money you can also try a paid advertisement at the forum. You can usually get pretty good rates for ads on niche forums.

A longer term marketing strategy is to do proper SEO on your website and build up your rankings organically. Then all the traffic you get is free. That is my only advertising strategy for LCD.

Your website
Now that your guide is ready to go you can create a website and start selling the guide. I have seen many people that sell guides online just use a one page website with very long sales copy. This tactic converts well, but you have to rely on traffic from affiliates and pay-per-click traffic because a one page website will not rank in search engines. One way to overcome this is to have articles written that are sub pages of the site but you still have the long sales copy home page.

The other main strategy is to create a website that is about the topic of your guide and then push the guide on the site. Your website can have articles and tips etc on the site to make the site bigger and appear more important to visitors and search engines.

People often want to know where to start when it comes to starting a business online. I mean the options are truly unlimited. If you have read about the Prosperly Way then you know that I like to create internet businesses that run themselves. I try to automate as much as I can so that it takes as little time to run as possible. If I help you start an internet business that takes you 60 hours a week to run then I really haven’t helped you.

So the best internet business model that I recommend first and foremost is to start an affiliate website.

Start An Affiliate Website

This is the internet business model that I have had the most success with. This is where I pick a very specific niche and then I create a website around the products in this niche. (I hire a writer, I don’t write the content myself) I then have links to buy the products we have talked about in the site which are affiliate links so we get paid a percentage for every sale we send them.

For example, if I owned a DVD website I would create a ton of content for individual DVD’s. I then would have affiliate links from Amazon or another DVD store telling people to go buy the movie. Anytime someone buys one of the DVD’s from Amazon, I would get paid a percentage.

If you find the right industry you can quickly make an impact in search engine rankings and start making money very quickly. A good example of this is from one of the websites I started back in 2007. I knew the industry wasn’t very SEO savvy but there was a lot of money being thrown around in the industry.

I hired a copywriter to add at least one page a day to the site and after 6 months the site was making $15,000 a month in affiliate sales. Now keep in mind that I was also doing a lot of link building for the site getting good quality one way links and the site was optimized properly for the search engines.

By that point we were ranking on page one of Google for almost every product included on the site and we also were dominating the search engines for the more general terms in the industry. I had companies in that industry contacting me and offering me a ton of money to help them achieve the same kind of results.

I was pleasantly surprised with these results in such a short amount of time. Even after having optimized hundreds of websites over the years I didn’t expect to see such dramatic results so quickly.

This internet model is good because as you write, or hire someone to write for the website, you are constantly adding fresh new content to your website. This content needs to be high quality good content. Visitors see right through junk. This will also help you achieve higher search engine rankings and thus more traffic to your website because of the quality original content being added.

So choose an industry you like and start an affiliate website. Try to find an industry that isn’t over saturated with affiliate sites out there already.

Word of advice: When you sign up for affiliate programs there are going to be some products you can make more money on than others. This will motivate you to recommend these higher paying products over other products you write about. This is a normal and effective practice.

What you need to avoid is being overly critical of other products on your site just to make the one you want to push look better. There is no need to do this. It just makes you look bad. If you offer good quality in depth content people will trust your recommendations. Be fair and don’t bash other peoples products unless they really are bash worthy. Most people are trying to put out a good quality product and some just do a better job than others.

This business model is great because you never have any customer service or products to ship. You just play the middle man and take a cut. When you’re talking about the best internet business ideas, for me this one tops the list.

Here is another good Prosperly internet business idea

Today was a great day. My family and I spent the day at a beautiful beach in North Shore here in Oahu. We watched sea turtles, ate fresh pineapple and did some snorkeling as well. I saw an eel in the water which freaked me out a bit but it was about 10 feet down at the bottom of the ocean. It was just a great family bonding time.

I came home tonight and checked the stats for today. I was pleasantly greeted with the following revenue stats for the day:

LawnCareDirectory – $99.95
ClearviewEducation – $384.96
Health Industry Site – $1082.52
Health Industry Site #2 – $94.52

That’s a grand total of $1661.75 that I made in one day while I was in Hawaii at the beach with my family. That is as good of an example of the Prosperly Way that I can possibly show you.

Well we just finished up our first day of our 10 day vacation here in Hawaii. I decided to bring my family here before my kids go back to school. This is the kind of thing that reminds me how blessed I am to have the kind of freedom to take my family on an awesome trip like this.

We went to the beach today and as I was doing to some body surfing I noticed a sea turtle about 10 feet away from me. I moved toward it and noticed that it was a group of 10 sea turtles. They were playing along the shore of the beach and stayed there for a couple of hours. It was a pretty cool experience for the first day of the trip.

I went golfing this morning. I shot one birdie and one par and many double bogeys. The weather and scenery was awesome. We played 9 holes which normally will be enough for me but I was ready for more.

When I came back to the office and I checked my email I had made $300 from LawnCareDirectory.com and another $59 from Clearvieweducation.com. All of it happened while I was golfing. So I got paid to golf…I guess that makes me a professional golfer. If so I am the worst pro golfer in the world.

I have to tell you that there is no better feeling than being out doing something I enjoy and my business still makes me money. That’s the way life should be lived.