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Need an additional monthly income stream? Here are four business ideas that you can pursue while sitting in front of the computer in your spare time. Bring in USD300, USD500, or even USD1,000 or more for just a few hours worth of effort every week. Choose the one that is right for your temperament, interests, and schedule.
1. An eBay Business
There are many people making a great living selling on eBay full-time, and many more who earn a respectable monthly income with a part-time eBay business. Coming up with a product idea isn't really all that difficult. Just about anything can be successfully sold on eBay, including information and downloadable products.
I have had good success in the ticket scalping business, which is incredibly easy. This simply means logging on to Ticketmaster when tickets for popular events are going on sale and then reselling them to the highest bidder on eBay after it sells out. This business will make steady profits month end and month out for very little effort. Many people do this, some full time. But there is plenty of room for additional ticket sellers because all that matters is that you were on the ball enough to score the tickets when they went on sale. You can do this nationwide - just follow the hot tours/events around the country and ship the tickets to your customers after you are paid.
All you need to run a successful part time eBay business is a little bit of training. After that the floodgate of product ideas will open and you will be off to the races. The following two books will get you up and running in no time.
2. Play Online Poker for Profits
This business is best suited for intelligent, patient, unemotional types who can handle the ups and downs of professional gambling, and who enjoy winning money as a result of being more skilled than their opponents. However, anyone who has trouble controlling a gambling urge will probably have trouble succeeding. An initial bankroll is required, as well as a winning game plan and/or the right set of skills. But a determined student can learn a winning methodology fairly quickly, and get started with as little as USD500.
You can learn to be a consistent winner at any form of poker, online or off. Since the airing of The World Poker Tour and other big poker events on television, the number of online poker players on the major sites such as Poker Stars has exploded (they run a commercial during the programs). Most of these new players are amateurs, which means that the majority of the low stakes online games have become very easy pickings. How popular has online poker become? Poker Stars is now the largest gathering place in the world for poker, with more than 100,000 registered players and thousands of people playing daily.
It is important for you to understand that the only reason you can make an income from this is because your opponents are playing poorly. If they weren't, then nobody would win (except for the card room). That's why we emphasize playing at the lower limits. The players there play loosely and often downright terribly.
Let's talk about online poker rooms. These are not online casinos. They offer "live" poker games only - that means you are playing against other live players for real money. The website takes a "rake" from the game, usually about USD1 for every USD20 in the pot. That is their income and motivation for running the site, and they make one heck of a lot of money from it, since there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of games going on at any given time, dealing anywhere from 50 to 100 hands per hour each. You do not need to worry about the games being rigged at Poker Stars or the handful of other large reputable online poker rooms. They are not. These sites have excellent customer service departments, which respond to complaints and do everything possible to make sure you are happy and that the integrity of the games remain intact.
3. The ebook Business
If you have some creative writing ability and maybe just a little bit of marketing savvy, you can write and sell ebooks online. It doesn't really matter what they are about. There are people that are interested in just about every subject there is, and they will pay a reasonable fee to expand their knowledge in whatever they are currently into. We all do it. We always have, and we always will. The information business is recession proof and forever enduring.
Don't think you have any information that is worth selling? That doesn't matter either. You can get it, quite easily - perhaps even by purchasing another ebook you plan to compete with! As long as you can write well, you can produce and sell ebooks online for reliable monthly profits. A good starting point for ideas is whatever you already happen to be an expert on. An even better starting point is noting whatever popular fads society seems to be in a craze for at the moment and doing some research on them. There are ebooks selling right now for just about everything. Go to a search engine and start typing in key words for popular culture terms and any niche markets you can think of - heartburn cures, zen meditation, feng shui, magic tricks, healing herbs, computer tips and tricks, bed and breakfast travel guide, attention deficit disorder, home brewing recipes, vegetable oil diesel conversions, and on and on you go. Maybe you'll come across a very popular topic that there are no ebooks selling for yet, giving you a very exciting market to work!
The best thing about this business is the residual income. Once you have a profitable product up and selling, the money continues to roll in for years without you having to do another thing - except, of course, write another ebook so your income can increase. After you get three or four of these going you will be hooked, and after you have a half-dozen or so you will have a very nice extra income stream coming in. The products are delivered automatically (downloaded by your customers), and the payments are handled by the payment processing company you use. All you know is that more books have sold and more checks are showing up in the mail. The only maintenance you have to do is with your advertising and responding to customer service emails. Of course you also must have a website where your sales page and product are located, but in this day and age that is a small expense and an easy arrangement.
ebooks are an electronic product and are usually an impulse buy. All you need is to have a decent product and a good sales page conveniently posted in cyberspace where those interested in the subject matter can stumble across it. This is normally done by using pay-per-click search engine ads, joining some appropriate forums around the internet where you can make subtle posts leading to your sales page, getting good search engine listings under your subject key words, link exchanging with other websites, and recruiting affiliates to do the selling for you. There are plenty of other marketing tactics available as well, including offline advertising in small specialty publications. The logistics of running a successful ebook business are limited only by your creativity.
If you can spend a few hours every week writing and working on your next ebook project you will be well rewarded with a steady income stream for your efforts. You can write the book itself on any word processing program - use a separate file for each chapter, and place these files in their own folder. When you are done you will convert the files into a working ebook using a piece of software known as a compiler. You also should create a simple graphic art piece for the cover artwork on your sales page.
4. Affiliate Sales
You can still make money from a part-time business selling ebooks and other downloadable products (like software programs) even if you do not wish to create the products yourself. You can sell other people's products as an affiliate. The profit margin will be much smaller of course, as you are working for a sales commission. This means you really have to watch your advertising expense, and stick to products that convert sales well. You will probably want to find niche markets that the product owner has not penetrated - either that, or be a heck of a lot better at writing pay-per-click ads. Many times a product seller will have missed some very good key search words that you can capitalize on, or perhaps you can utilize another pay-per-click network that the seller has neglected. Working the forums around the net is a very common method of affiliate marketing as well. The reason you see other people doing this is because it works!
The nice thing about this business is you have no products to develop, ship, or deliver and no processing of any orders or payments. In fact you don't even need to be notified of the sales. You run a few ads, move around the internet making posts in forums, and checks show up in your mailbox. Also, your inventory of products can be as wide as you can handle or want to work with. You will have to do some marketing and advertising accounting to make this work, but when properly done a few hours every week should earn you at least a few hundred dollars every month. There are some products that affiliates have done exceptionally well with. For example, there is a spyware removal software program sold through Clickbank that the affiliates climb all over each other running competing Google Adword campaigns on. Some of these affiliates have earned around USD2,000 per month steady on this product alone, even with all the competition.
Good products in hot markets always have room for more affiliates. If you want to dabble just a bit in this to see how you do, may we suggest the affiliate program for How to Shake the Online Poker MoneyTree, which is an online poker strategy book that is pictured above in the Online Poker Business section. Poker is an extremely hot market and this product really is the best one we've seen in the category. You will earn USD19.60 per sale. Sign up and go searching around the internet for poker forums, which should be easy to find. Make subtle posts about the quality of this book and sneak your affiliate link in there. Forum posts are most effective in existing threads as opposed to starting your own topic, but that works sometimes too - depending on your creativity (it just shouldn't blatantly look like spam).
Conclusion
The purpose of listing potential online businesses on this website is to allow you to create an income stream that can be used for trading and/or investing so you can become wealthy over the next 10-15 years. Please don't forget to do that with your profits! There is a lot of garbage being peddled on the internet about how to make money. Stay away from most of it. These four businesses are real and you can succeed at any of them if you have a mind to.
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