An odd thing happened today. I got tracked down by a fellow Irishman today who wanted to ask me some questions on my affiliate marketing business. For those of you who don’t know me that’s what I do to put bread on the table here

Anyway this guy had put quite a bit of effort into tracking me down and getting in touch with me to ask me some questions about what I did. Now I have zero problem with this – especially because he wasn’t looking for a handout; just some advice and to see if the concept of making money is actually real. 15 minutes later he was relieved to find out it wasn’t all hocus pocus and that you can make a full-time income from working online.

The point I’m getting at here is that we can forget just how much we know about a subject and how much that knowledge can help others – even in 15 short minutes. I didn’t change that guys life but I heard more hope in his voice at the end of our chat. That was more payment than others have given me for hours of my time!

Never discount what you know – it will always be of value to somebody else.  And give without hesitation and expect nothing in return. You will be rewarded in more ways than one.

With the world economy in a recession and with factory closures and layoffs becoming a daily occurrence it’s time for anyone with any smarts to really think about earning at least a part-time secondary income. Off-line. Online. It doesn’t matter – start taking steps to protect the financial interests of your and your family. The recession will end and the economy will recover but over the next 24 – 36 months never, ever take your eye off that ball. One of the best ways to generate a secondary income is to have a home based business.

So what will your new home business be about? That’s the biggest hurdle which most people face. Most people go for the instant answer of MLM (bleh…nasty) or some other pyramid marketing fiasco that only makes others rich and poor people ever poorer. Then there are franchises and business opportunity fairs but you normally have to fork out thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to even get started in these ventures.

Remember we want to start generating a second income here. Make money. Not spend even more money you don’t have. It’s amazing how many people will max out their credit card(s) on a business opportunity that goes nowhere. Crazy!

So how can you generate ideas for a home based business?

Take a notepad and write down every single hobby, interest or skill you have. Don’t think about it too much. Just brainstorm it and write down anything that comes to mind. It could be surfing, flower arranging, antique collecting, owning pets, being a computer whizz, shopping on e-bay. They’re just random ideas that came to mind while I was writing this.

Keep writing for at least 30 minutes. Don’t stop. Don’t ring a friend to chat. Don’t watch some TV. Just write and keep writing until you have no more ideas left.

Okay now take the list you’ve just written and read through it.

Circle all the ideas that appeal to you.

Narrow that list down to the top 9 ideas.

Now narrow it down to 3 ideas.

Which of the 3 ideas or topics jumps off the page at you?

Which of them sets a fire in your belly and makes you feel passionate about it?

Which of them is something you’d love to do each day as a full time job?

That’s how you track down the perfect business idea for generating a secondary (or maybe full-time) income from home.

Oh and keep that ideas list in a safe place!! You’ve just done some excellent brainstorming – it will come in useful in the future.

If you’re interested in learning how I make money from home then I can highly recommend the following book for you to read:

How to become an affiliate marketer.

The goal of the vast majority of businesses is to generate revenue. Cash. Money. Income. Big business or small business – if you’re not generating money or revenue of some kind then you’re outta business.

For bigger businesses this isn’t something that’s focused on straight away. Indeed many businesses expect to simply break even for their first or second year if they’re lucky. After that they set out plans for generating actual profits.

For somebody who’s working from a home office running at a loss or simply breaking even isn’t enough. The business needs to be generating some profit above operating costs otherwise you’re operating in debt – which is just plain stupid. Oh I’ve done it. Operated in debt that is. Twice in my life – never, ever again. Seriously it’s a dumb thing to do.

What I want to focus on here though is profit not debt. Profit and something that hit me the other day. For those of you who don’t know I run a web development business which has very low overheads (which I love). This has been generating a healthy profit for a while and I’ve been enjoying the entire experience of being financially stable (and a bit more than that for the first time in many years if truth be told.

So all along I’ve been enjoying the profits from the business but I lost sight of something. I haven’t been reinvesting in my own business as much as I should be. The philosophy of “Hey it’s running ok as it is” is where I’d become shortsighted. I’ve realized that for investing about 15% of my income from the business each month back into the business I can potentially double my net profits. What would this mean to me? It would put me in a six figure income bracket within 12 months (if not less).

DOH!

It took investment of time and money (blood, sweat and tears also of course) to get the business up and running. I forgot to reinvest in the business now as much as I did then. Over the 14 days I’ve been reinvesting in the business and am already seeing the results of this. Oh and a client came back and bought three websites from me for several thousand so that was nice too

The point I’m making is this. You have to invest in your life, your relationships, your health and your business if you expect any return from them. It’s that simple.

Hope this sparks something in the grey matter of some of you reading this!

Hyphenated or dashed domains have long been the favourite of Internet and affiliate marketers. Why? Simply because it allowed them to pack the domain full of the primary keywords for their market. When this all began it was used responsibly by sensible marketers. They saw the benefit of including maybe one keyword in their domain. The search engines didn’t complain and everyone was basically happy.

Then the spammers got hold of it and have now abused it to such an extent that search engines like Google and Yahoo are now beginning to filter hyphenated domains from their search results. This is a case of cause and effect but the funny thing now is that the search engine spammers are whining because of this yet they caused the exact problem they’re now complaining about. The irony eh?

Read the full article here.

You’ve done all your brainstorming and come up with an absolutely brilliant domain name that both brands your business and let’s people know what you sell or represent. The next step is finding someplace to host your domain name. Having your own website or web based business is a two step process.

1. Register domain

2. Host domain

After you register the domain name it’s normally “parked” with the registrar. Parking means that the domain registrar will put up a temporary page for you saying that the domain has been registered but nothing has been done with it yet. 99.9% of all domain registrars offer this facility free of charge. This is fine as a temporary measure but the sooner you get your hosting sorted out the better; especially seeing as how most registrars make money from advertising on parked domains. Yup. Really.

Read the rest of this article on web hosting.

The massive growth of the Internet is like the goldrush of the 1800s all over again. There are thousands of opportunities to get wealthy from doing business online and smart business people have been speculating on Internet “property” since the early 1990’s. Property? Yes believe it or not the buying and selling of Virtual Real Estate (VRE) is huge business. Absolutely massive!

Read the rest of this article on buying and selling domain names and websites.