|pros • per • ly|

Stephen R. Covey’s wildly successful The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People touts one of the seven habits as follows:

Begin with the End In Mind. This chapter is about setting long-term goals based on “true north” principles. Covey recommends formulating a “personal vision statement” to document one’s perception of one’s own vision in life. He sees visualization as an important tool to develop this. He also deals with organizational vision statements, which he claims to be more effective if developed and supported by all members of an organization rather than prescribed. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People

This is obviously effective, setting long-term goals based on true principles.  Where I see a breakdown happen all the time is in just starting.  I suppose Covey might say be proactive (it’s numero uno).

Many times when people first begin building their internet business, they’re wanting to have an outlined, detailed business plan of exactly what they’re going to do to reach success (however defined) with their business.  You’ll see a person think through things to such an extent that they never actually start doing anything.

In this internet age, it’s even worse.  Why?  Because there is so much information available, you easily fall prety to paralysis by analysis.  For instanace let’s say you just want to get started with a little affiliate website where you try and get traffic through AdWords.  You could spend days — weeks — reading all about AdWords, optimizing, peeling and sticking, testing, evaluating, scrutinizing…

And never actually start.

Learning By Doing works.  Quite well.

Part of the reason we want to be outfitted with all the information possible (which right there disqualifies us, because that’s impossible) is because we’re afraid to make mistakes.  Learning from mistakes is a very quick way to learn, and it’s honestly not that expensive when you’re just starting.

Pick some key metrics that you want to track with your site: Visitors? Sales? Pageviews? Clickthroughs? Pick whatever’s important for your business goal and then write down three things that you need to DO (not learn about) to improve those metrics.  Do you need to reach out to other bloggers?  Write more? Find more keyword niches where you could profitably advertise?

Don’t worry about the Grand Scheme of Things when it comes to your business.  Don’t worry about every single logistic.  For heaven’s sake don’t waste a week on a logo, business card design, letterhead, legal formation, or accounting software.  That’s what I call circling the bush.  You only have success when you start beating the bush — circling it doesn’t do anything except give you a few warm fuzzies so you can go home at night feeling like you accomplished something.

Start DOING and things will fall into place–don’t worry so much about the big picture.  Suddenly, when you’re making money, you’ll need to do some accounting, and you’ll need to form a legal entity, and you’ll want to maybe have a professional-looking logo.  In the meantime, it’s better to just start (do the logo yourself) and not sweat the details.

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

Many people call or email me all the time telling me how they hate their jobs and want a quick way to start an online business and make money online so they can quit their job and have freedom.

It’s funny how so many people have the perception that I live this lifestyle where I never have to do any work and the money just magically keeps coming in. There is truth in the fact that I do have more freedom than most people, but I work my butt off. I come into the office at 8am and don’t leave until 5pm. I take a lunch break, a workout break and sometimes a golf break but other than that I am at my desk working. It doesn’t feel like work to me because I love to do it but I stay very busy.

Now, down from the soap box.

Here is the quickest way to start an online business.

Buy One That Already Exists. The hardest part of starting a new internet business is the time it takes to get the website created, get traffic, and then monetize the site. There are millions of people just like you that have already gone through that painful start-up process. The good thing for you is that most of them didn’t or don’t know what they are doing and are making either a little or no money. With the right internet marketing knowledge you can quickly improve a website and start making more money than the previous owner was.

If you buy an existing website the right way you immediately have a website that is either already receiving traffic, already making money or both. You also get to pick what industry you want which is important.

If you spend a little more money and get a website that is already making a good amount of money then you know you have a proven business model. All you need is to learn how to run the site and you are good to go.

What I think you will need to know to take over another website:

1. Basic HTML and maybe some CSS
2. How websites are structured (How dynamic sites work)
3. Good Understanding of SEO
4. What You Can Do To Improve The Site – If you can’t find anything, then you may not want to offer as much.

Some may argue that you need to have a good knowledge of social media, internet marketing as a whole, or other principles.  This list is what you need to take over a website. You will need to learn these other techniques as you go but I don’t think they are 100% necessary in the beginning.

Read my post on How To Buy An Existing Website Effectively

A Word Of Advice:
If you are like most people I talk to then you are looking for a way out of the 9-5 job and so that is why you are trying to make money online. Well good for you. I have to warn you that as your new internet business or businesses start to make money, you will be very tempted just to ditch your job and focus only on your websites. Don’t do that. Don’t quit your job until you can replace your income completely. I was making over $70k a year with my internet stuff before I quit my day job. I could have done it sooner maybe but it was too big of a risk for my family.

Read My Posts About Buying An Existing Website

Buying A Website – Part 1
Buying A Website – Part 2

Where To Find Good Established Websites To Buy

There are a few places that I go to check different websites for sale. Before I give you those websites let me recommend the best way to find a website to purchase.

Choose the industry you want to have a website in. Do a Google search for one of your top key phrases. Go through all the websites on page 2 or 3 of the search results. Those should be your top candidates. They have done all of the preliminary work for you but are probably not making much money because they can’t get to page one in their rankings.

For example if I wanted to own a website in the wrinkle cream vertical I would use one of the free keyword search tools and look up popular key phrases in that vertical. Let’s say I choose the phrase “anti wrinkle cream”. I would then go to Google and search that term. Then I would go to the 3rd or 4th pages of results and look at all of the websites there. Those are the best candidates for websites to purchase.

Choose a couple of sites you wouldn’t mind owning or websites that you see just need a few changes and you can make some good improvements. Once you have found one you like send the owner an email asking to buy the site.

You can even look on page one of the search results and offer to buy one of those websites but they price will most likely be higher because they are probably making money. Then again you can always fine steals if you actively look.

Here is a good template email you can use to gauge the interest of a site owner. I have used this exact email to start the process and eventually successfully purchase websites.

Subject line: I’m interested in making an offer to buy websitename.com

My name is your name and I am currently planning on making a few acquisitions in the (name of industry) vertical and I was wondering if you would ever considered selling www.websitename.com.

I know this email is out of the blue, but let me assure you that I’m a serious buyer who isn’t looking to waste anyone’s time with below market offers. If you’re at all interested, please get back to me, as I’m available during regular business hours at the number below, or anytime here at my email email@youremail.com.

Thanks,

Your Signature Goes Here

Feel free to take this email and reword it to fit your needs. I just included it so you could see an example of an effective email to get a site owner to respond and take you seriously.

Once you have started correspondence with them, you need to find out from them the 10 questions I mentioned above before making an offer. Many of the questions you can answer without talking to the person. Some of them you will need answered by the owner. For this I have included a second email you can use.

Here is a secondary email I have used to get the information I need in order to make a real offer.

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I would love to get some more information from you before I make you an official offer.

How old is the website?

How many unique visitors did the site get in the last 3 months? How about for the last 12 months?

What is the site’s income for the last 3 months? Income for the last 12 months?

Thanks for your help on this.

Adam White
555-555-5555
adam@prosperly.com

Once the website owner has answered these questions you can look at the responses and then determine the price you are willing to offer.

What To Offer
How much you should offer when you are buying a website can be a difficult thing to decide. In the brick and mortar business world you can typically expect to pay 3 years of net income for a business. The internet business world is a little different. A standard going rate is about 10-12 months of net income. If the website is a “Prosperly” website you can pay much more.

If you find a Prosperly website that you want to buy you should still start off by offering a typical amount of 10-12 months net income. If they don’t bite then you need to evaluate what the site is worth to you and up your offer if you feel like you should. Sometimes you have to use your own judgment when making an offer and throw the standard website purchase rules out the window.

I recently found a website that was on page 3 of Google for one of the main terms in the industry I was looking at. The site was ugly and not optimized for search engines like it could be. I went through this process of emailing the owner and then he told me that in the last 12 months the site had made a grand total of $16.37. So based on the standard 12 month income mark the site was worth $20 at the most.

I knew this was a Prosperly website and that the owner of the site would ignore me if I came in with an offer below $100. I offered him $200. He turned down the offer because the reward for him wasn’t high enough to get him to part with the site. I finally asked him what it would take to part with the site and he said $500. I took the deal immediately. Even though the final sale price was 25 years worth of income based on what the site was currently making, I was confident that I could turn the website into an automated machine making $500 every day. So the $500 sale price to me was almost laughable.

I got the website, did a complete redesign (but kept all of the old file names the same) and started adding a ton of content. The day the site was re-indexed after my changes (1 week after I got full ownership) it shot up to page 2 of Google for one of the biggest key phrases. The website immediately started getting traffic and making money. After a couple of weeks the site was making about $100 a day.

I know that deciding what to pay for a website can be difficult, just make sure you are pretty confident you can make back whatever the final sales price is in one year.

Here are some other places to buy and sell websites:

http://www.websitebroker.com – Make sure that you check the date the site was listed because they have a lot of old crap on there that is long since sold.

Read Part 1 of Buying A Website