The beginning of the year I had all these plans to travel to different states. Florida, Atlanta and California. Going to South Africa was definitely not in my plans. However, the stars seemed to align to make this trip possible.

I didn’t start thinking about going to South Africa until May of this year. I had a friend who was returning there. When she left to go back, I said I have to go there.

Now prior to this the only countries I’ve visited outside of the U.S. was England and Antigua. And the longest flight was about 11 hours.

South Africa is roughly a 22 hour flight.

So I heard from the grapevine that another friend of mine was planning to travel to South Africa in July. After speaking with him, he offered to let me stay at his place during my visit.

So I hadn’t bought the ticket yet and I already had a place to stay I the foreign country.

Since this was my first time traveling there, I felt it was imperative that I travel with my friend on the same flight at him.

Now remember I wasn’t planning to go to South Africa so I didn’t have money saved up ready to purchase the ticket. You can search on your own to see how much a round trip ticket to South Africa costs.

So while I am trying to figure out how I’m going to pay for this plane ticket, I get an email out of the blue from a gentleman from Denmark who is ready to give me money.

It sounds hard to believe, but yes. This guy wanted to give me money to buy one of my domain names. The timing couldn’t be more perfect.

After a few emails back and forth, I had the money deposited in my bank account.

I was able to go to South Africa. I had a blast. Check out some of the photos.

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One thing I should mention about how this relates to having an online business is that I did not have a job. Things might not have gone so smoothly if I did. I wasn’t tied down to a 9 to 5; so I could travel at any time. I didn’t have to check how many sick days I had left or get my vacation approved by a manager. The keyword is flexibility. Flexibility, or freedom with how you spend your time, is one of the great benefits of having your own online business.

The plane ticket cost over $2,000. I sold a domain name for a few thousand dollars in profit. The entire process was done over email. This more than paid for my trip.

So when you think about it; I traveled to South Africa for free. Actually, I made a profit!

Now the average person is not a salesman. They are just a guy/gal who love to talk about what they love. So how does the average person sell without knowing how to sell?

“Be like water my friends.”

Sorry, I just wanted to sound cool. Here is what you do.

1. Don’t sell. Make recommendations.
You will not succeed if you are known as the guy always selling stuff to people. People are really good at sniffing those kind of people out. You don’t want to be that guy. Don’t you ignore or hang up on telemarketers? There are online versions of them as well. Don’t be that guy.

Instead make recommendations. If you are writing a blog post about a problem that many of your readers face. You can show them how to solve the problem and recommend a tool they can use to help.

For example, I can write a blog post about how to make your blog look nice. I can show to you how to change the header image or the css styles. I can also recommend that you get a really professional WordPress theme from WooThemes. The link to WooThemes would be my affiliate link and if someone buys a theme I would get paid.

See?

I didn’t say you should go now to buy a theme from WooThemes because they are so awesome. I just said you might want to check out this resource if you are interested in solving this problem (making your blog look professional).

2. Don’t hype but reveal what will really happen.
Don’t make crazy unbelievable claims about the product or service trying to make money. Be honest with your audience. Show them what will really happen and what they can expect if they choose to purchase the product.

Being honest builds trust. If people trust you they will trust your recommendations and buy whatever you are selling. And that’s what every business owner really wants. Peoplewho will buy from them over and over again. If you over hype something and customers see the real deal afterwards, you may get a quick sale buy they willl never trust you again to buy anything.

3. Don’t try to make money of people. Give high value information and have them want to pay you back in return.
Gary Vaynerchuk calls this the “Thank You Economy“. This is where you go above and beyond providing value and helping people for free. Helping them solve problems and being a trusted source of information. Then when you come out with a product your audience loves you so much they will buy your product as a way of saying thank you.

Gary attributes this as the reason why his first book Crush It sold so well. People wanted to say thank you for all the years of free content he put out on his WineLibrary TV show.

Don’t focus on making sales. If you are helping people online wit your content and providing value you will be trusted. And people buy from people they trust.

Remember the saying, “The best sales pitch is no sales pitch at all.”

photo credit: ilovememphis

One of them is the security of consistent income. If you leave your job how can you continue paying the bills? A passive income business doesn’t happen overnight so what should I do in the meantime?

Even if you’ve saved up some money before leaving the job to focus on your online business, there comes a point when that money will run out unless you are able to add to it.

When Gary Vaynerchuck stepped away from running the daily operations of WineLibrary.com to start WineLibrary TV he had a starting point. He business was already profitable. He had the financial cushion to focus on his online wine show until it grew to what it is today. “The Internet’s Most Passionate Wine Program”

I preach alot about following your passion and going after your own online business. But after personal experience and seeing the apprehension of others, I understand there is only so much you can do in your business if you are worried about the rent and food.

So here is what you should do.

If you are currently working at a 9-5 job:

Don’t leave your job until you are matching your income.
Start working on your passive income business after hours. Hustle hard to get the business where you want it. And when you have a godo amount of income coming in you can easily switch “jobs”.

Work less hours at your job.
If you work less hours you are able to come home earlier to work on your business for longer. You may also be able to network more since you would have more time.

Take on less responsibility.
Sometimes working after hours is not the issue it’s having the energy to stay up to work on your business that’s the problem. I know that after a regular (not hard) day at the job I can so out of it my brain literaly is tired. I don’t even want to see the computer.

If you are responsible for less at your job, it will leave you with more brain power to focus on your passion.

Try to work from home.
When you work from home at least one day a week you have more freedom over your day. You can schedule your time better. If staying up late is not your thing, you can get up early and work on your business in your pajamas. You can make/take phone calls that you can’t at the job. You can meet someone for lunch that you couldn’t if you were at the job because of the 30 minutes or hour limit you have for lunch.

Switch to a telecommuting job.
Many jobs will not allow you to work from home. Try looking for a job that will. For the reasons I stated above it can be a tremendous help to your business.

Decrease your expenses.
One of the easiest things you can do is cut out alot of your bills. Do you really need cable when you work crazy hours and are never home? Do you really need that gym membership that you hardly use? Can you bring in a roommate to help with the rent or move into a studio?

When I started focusing on my passion I decreased my expenses tremendously. I pay dramatically less rent. I live closer to things so I spend less on transportation.

With less bills, I stress less about how much money I need to make.

You still need to eat and pay bills while building your business. There are ways to ease your way into the passive income world and still have peace of mind.

 photo credit: Derek E-Jay

That’s why I’ve composed a list of places where you can research the right affiliate programs to join and promote to your audience.

Enjoy!

Associate Programs

Affiliate Seeking

Top Affiliate

Green Affiliate Programs

Top Affiliate List

Which Affiliate

Affiliate Tracking Network

Affiliate Marketing 411

Affiliate Directory

Affiliate First

Jam Affiliates

Affiliate Base

Affiliate Summary

Affiliate Ranch

Affiliate Ranker

Affiliate Cash Directory

Affiliate Hangout

100 Best Affiliate Programs

Affiliates Directory

In my business I am learning that I need to set goals in order to make sure I am getting things done. If I don’t then I lose focus quickly, projects get delayed and money goes away. In this video, I talk about the 5 reasons why you should always be setting goals.

1. Gives Clarity On Your Ultimate Goal – You now have direction to where you want to accomplish.
2. Pushes You Forward – Gives you motivation to keep doing what you are doing.
3. Makes You Super Focused – You don’t waste time going after shiny objects. You spend time on what’s important.
4. Get Things Done Faster – You make things happen faster and are more efficient.
5. Keeps You Accountable – It makes sure you are doing what you need to be doing.

Here are 2 of my goals:
Lose 25 pounds by December 31.
Write at least 4 posts per week.

Please comment below and let me know what are your goals are. Let’s keep each other accountable!

Click Here to Order: Stories of the World’s Most Successful Internet Marketing Entrepreneurs

This is a new book that I am starting to read. It is 300 pages and has a ton of information about the back stories of successful entrepreneurs and their businesses. Because of the content and writing style it’s going to take me a lot longer to finish that  Crush It! but I know it will be worth it.

What I like about it is that you always hear about the stories of the gorilla internet companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter but what about the small business doing $20 million a year in sales? This book goes into that.

Think of it as the paperback version of Mixergy. (I hope no one gets offended by that analogy.)  I love Mixergy.

About the Author

Joel Comm is an Internet entrepreneur who has been online for 20 years. In 1995, Joel launched WorldVillage.com, a family-friendly portal to the web which enjoys thousands of visitors each day. In 1997, him and his partner created ClassicGames.com, which was acquired by Yahoo!, and now goes by the name Yahoo! Games. Since then, his company has launched over a dozen web sites, including the popular bargain-hunting shopping site, DealofDay.com, SafetySurf.com and FamilyFirst.com. Joel Comm is the author of several best-selling ebooks that show people how to make money online, and regularly speaks and teaches at conferences, seminars and workshops. Joel is the host and executive producer of The Next Internet Millionaire, the world’s first competitive Internet reality show.

Check out Click Here to Order

According to MailChimp:

there are some industries that send certain types of content that result in higher than normal bounce rates and abuse complaints, which in turn jeopardize the deliverability of our entire system. No offense intended, but because we must ensure the highest delivery rates possible for all our customers, we do not allow businesses that offer these types of services, products, or content:

• Illegal goods or services
• Escort and dating services
• Pharmaceutical products
• Work from home, Internet Lead-gen, Make money on online opportunities, etc.
• Online trading, day trading tips, or stock market related content
• Gambling services, products or gambling education
• Multi-level marketing
• Affiliate marketers
• Credit repair, get-out-of-debt content
• Mortgages and/or Loans
• Nutritional Supplements, Herbal Supplements or Vitamin Supplements
• Pornography or nudity in content
• Adult novelty items or references in content
• List brokers or List rental services
• Marketing or sending commercial email without proper permission

This move by MailChimp will cost them alot of business. Even if a company is not heavily into promoting other offers as an affiliate They we not use their service for that reason alone.

I have never used MailChimp personally; aside from on behalf of my web design clients. At one point I was thinking about maybe testing them out. Their biggest selling point is that the first 2000 emails are free.

But now I’m glad I am with Aweber. Aweber loves working with affiliate marketers and over 100,000 of them use their service. If you want to get into afffiliate marketing you must choose go with Aweber.

That’s why I love automation.

Automation is using processes, tools, systems or software to get things done without human interaction. All the big companies use to work more efficiently, save money and please their customers.

Business process automation, or BPA, is the strategy a business uses to automate processes in order to contain costs. It consists of integrating applications, restructuring labor resources and using software applications throughout the organization. – Wikipedia

It’s part of the saying “Word Smarter, Not Harder“.

Here are the reasons why automation is important.

Save time. By using technology to get things done, they can be completed faster than doing them yourself. Also, since you are not the one doing them there is less of a chance of you putting things off to the last minute.

Save money. Since time is money, if you are saving time, you are also saving money at the same time. This is because it leaves you more time to focus on money-making activites. Plus you don’t need to pay and/or train someone else to do those tasks.

It’s scalable. You might think you are fine doing those 10 simple tasks a week on your own. But as your business grows, so does the amount of those tasks. If you have an automation system in place you can add as many tasks as you want.

I’ve already touched on this topic briefly when I blogged  52 Week Method For Making Money With Your Email List. This is where you use Aweber’s autorepsonders to automatically send emails for you for a year.

Here is something cool. I’m not actually typing out this blog post right now. I’m really using this nice little tool that I found which allows me to talk while it writes the post for me. This tool, which I will write…er…talk about in another post, allows me to get my thoughts down quickly and create blog posts faster.

There are tons of tools out there to automate certain task. Think about how you can apply the same idea to all aspects of your day. What do you spend a lot of time doing that you could automate?

Free up some time; let technology work for you while you focus on with the things that are really important.

 photo credit: burgerfeet1

photo credit: computationally.intractable

To set up the right business you need sources of income where you aren’t tied to a time or location. A lot of successful business owners have some interesting systems that generate passive income.

Today I want to share with you some of these sneaky passive income methods that you can use for yourself. It is important to mention, these require you to have outsourced virtual staff to do them, and they are not designed for you to run.

Passive income method #1:

Setting up and running numerous blogs that generates income through selling advertising and affiliate products in a few different niches.

An example is a car blog that has numerous writers updating this blog daily with reviews and industry news. Through this they generate lots of traffic to their website and sell monthly advertising subscriptions to car manufacturers and any company interested to advertise to a car following readership.

Additionally, they generate income through selling car accessories and make a commission on each item they sell, without the need to handle deliveries and customer service.

Passive income method #2:

Sell outsourcing services through Elance or oDesk and have all work outsourced to people in the Philippines.

This method is to craft good sales letters promoting to businesses that need work to be completed on Elance or oDesk. The prices offered are in line with what others charge and you simply become a referral service and collect a commission on every job referred and completed.

Passive income method #3:

Owning a web application and collecting royalities from the sales. The method behind this is to have a team of web developers create an application that a market wants and setup a system to sell it online.

A great example is a web application called Basecamp, which was targeted towards business owners and assisting them with managing their projects online with virtual staff or employees within their company. This company charges a monthly fee to use this software and they continue to collect passive income as long as the system runs online.

Passive income method #4:

Setup an e-commerce website which sells products directly to a niche market. You can have a team setup your online retail store and have drop shippers or dispatchment companies manage and send out your products.

Tim Ferriss from the 4-Hour Workweek owns a protein supplement company that targets the martial arts niche. Tim sells hundreds of his products to these customers every day and doesn’t even touch any of the products let alone run the company. He has a team of virtual staff that keeps his online store running and he collects the income from the profits.

Passive income method #5:

Own a membership site that offers valuable content and resources to a community of members.

There are many niches where membership sites can be setup to provide information, tutorials, allow members to share resources and for them to interact with each other. They are each charged a monthly a fee for them to be part of this online community.

There is a tennis membership site that had over 1,000 members paying $20 a month. He was generating easily $20,000 a month from providing tennis how-to tips and allowing for all his members to interact with each other.

These are just 5 of the many methods out there that you can use to create the life you want.

If you are not already using one of these sneaky passive income methods, I encourage you today to think of an idea within a niche to get setup by virtual staff. Get Started!

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