I hope you’ve enjoyed Millionaire Secrets Series Part 1, 2 and 3.1 so far. I apologise that I have to split Part 3 into 2 different posts because as I was writing, I realised I had too much to cover (Part 3.1 crosses 3,000 words) and I thought it’d be better to break it up.
Wealth Academy Day 2 Coach Debrief
If you prefer one super long post instead of reading 2 or more separate posts, please leave your feedback in the ‘Comments’ section at the end of this post so I know what you prefer. I’d appreciate your feedback very much.
However, if this is the first Millionaire Secrets Series post you’re reading, I’d suggest you begin with Part 1, Lesson 1: Developing a Millionaire Mindset so that you’ll gain the most out of the series.
Besides, there’s a lot to be learnt in every lesson. 
But if you’ve been following the series, then let’s carry on from where I’d ended previously.
Strategies to Raise Your Scalability and Create Passive Income
1. Sell your intellectual property
2. Start an Internet business
In the last section of Part 3.1, I’ve already talked to you about Strategy 1. So now I shall move on to Strategy 2.
Strategy 2: Start an Internet Business
During the Wealth Academy workshop, Adam Khoo did not expand very much on starting a traditional brick-and-mortar business. He has created a new workshop for that. It’s called the Millionaire Business Academy (MBA). The first workshop will commence on the 27th Nov 2008. You can check it out at www.millionairebizacademy.com.
However, he did touch more on starting an Internet business.
Personally, I find that, although he gave a very good idea of the benefits of starting an Internet business and provided some good insights on how to start one, it is still somewhat brief in my opinion.
If you’re interested in finding out more about starting an Internet business, I’d suggest you learn more about it with the Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet by The Internet Marketing Center.
This is by far the most comprehensive step-by-step guide in the market on how to start your own Internet business.
Or if you’re interested in creating a passive income through a blog like me, I strongly recommend you the Blog Mastermind programme created by Yaro Starak, the founder of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com.
Blog Mastermind is a step-by-step course that focuses solely on blogging. This is the course I’m currently going through to help me start and run my blog. I’ve not finished devouring all the 27 lessons (as of 12 Nov 08), plus 5 advance lessons and a few other bonuses, but so far, it’s been of tremendous help.
The Truth About Internet Marketing
If you’re new to the concept of starting an Internet business or Internet Marketing as it is commonly known, let me just run you through briefly before you decide if it’s right for you.
I have to first admit that there’s been a lot of hype on making quick and easy money on the Internet. However, nothing is further from the truth.
Perhaps you’re still haunted by the dotcom bust during the year 2000, where a lot of Internet businesses went bankrupt.
During that period, many investors lost big money because they didn’t understand the Internet businesses they were investing in. Most of these businesses had poor business fundamentals and were destined to fail right from the beginning.
Their stocks value skyrocketed simply because of the hype created around them. These businesses were nothing more than an empty shell.
Right now, I’m not talking about Internet businesses that require millions of dollars of funding. I’m talking about Internet businesses that require as little as a few hundred dollars to begin with.
Many Internet Marketers have built very successful businesses that are making hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions a year starting with very little money.
Sure there are people out there promising fast, easy and big money. They’ll even offer you a business-in-a-box which you can start making money right away.
The truth is there is no such thing as fast and easy money. Building an Internet business is the same as building any other businesses. It takes time, commitment and a lot of hard work.
If you’re willing to do whatever it takes (legally, morally and ethically) to make it work for you, there’s a high possibility that you’ll make very good money from it.
You may not be able to make millions or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, but think of it this way: if you make just $500 a month from your Internet business and you have 5 of these businesses, you’d be making $2,500 a month, which works out to $30,000 a year! And this is just your passive income! The best part is you don’t even need to quit your job to do it.
What do you think you can do with an extra $30,000 a year? Buy a bigger house? Take more vacations? Or use that money to buy another property as an investment so that your money will grow even more?
You can do whatever you want with that extra money. You only have to make sure you don’t buy into the bulls and craps of fast and easy money, and learn from only the best like the two courses I mentioned earlier.
Here are some examples of ordinary people just like you and me who are making a good living from their Internet businesses:
• Yee Shun Jian. Website: www.RichGrad.com
SJ is a coach at the Patterns of Excellence workshop – another workshop conducted by Adam Khoo. SJ started his blog in July 07 and less than a year later he’s managed to make very comfortable living from being a full time blogger.
He’s posted photos of the cheques he’s received from Commission Junction in April, May and June, and perhaps you’d like to pop by that post here to take a look. The amount he received in June came up to more than S$5,000!
• Leigh Peele. Website: www.AvidityFitness.net
Just like me, Leigh also joined the Blog Mastermind programme and runs a blog called The Fat Loss Troubleshooter.
But Leigh is enjoying a much greater level of success than me. Since she joined the programme, her blog has grown tremendously and is now getting as many as 5,000 unique visitors per day!
An even greater piece of news is that she’s now making about $4,500 a month! It’s only been about 4 months (as of 12 Nov 08) from the time she joined the programme.
Quick money is possible after all! But of course nobody should expect that kind of result to be guaranteed. I’m not expecting it, neither should you.
Leigh did put in a lot of hard work to achieve that outcome. You can listen to her podcast interview with Yaro Starak here about how she managed to achieve that feat within such a short period of time.
• Julie Swatek. Website: www.ScrapYourTrip.com
Just six years ago, Julie was laid off by her employer due to a corporate merger, while she was five and a half months pregnant.
With another 3-year-old child at home to take care of, she knew she had to find a way to make money working from home. Therefore, she started an Internet Business selling travel-themed scrapbooking supplies with the help of The Internet Marketing Center.
Today, her website draws 60,000 unique visitors every month, and generated a sales revenue of US$1.3 Million in 2007.
• Aaron Bradley. Website: www.AaronBeats.com
To become an entrepreneur has always been Aaron’s dream. Being just a teenager at the age of 19, he launched his website providing instrumental tracks for hip-hop, R & B, gospel and pop music for musical artists.
Aaron didn’t have much success in the early days of his business, until he took a training programme from The Internet Marketing Centre.
Now, Aaron’s website draws between 7,000 to 8,000 unique visitors per month and he’s on track for sales of US$100,000.
8 Ways to Make Money Online
Now that you know it’s absolutely possible for the small guy to build a profitable business on the Internet, let me share with you the 8 different ways which you can implement to start making money online.
Some of them do require you to have your own website, while some do not. So let’s take a peep to find out.
1. Sell Physical Products
This is the most common way to start any business. You could sell books, toys, electronic gadgets, video games, clothes or any products you personally use and/or are passionate about.
However, this also involves the most hassle of all because you have to take care of inventory, packaging, wear & tear, and shipping & handling. But it allows you to have more control of the quality and costs of your products, especially if you’re developing your own products.
There are both advantages and disadvantages in selling other people’s products and your own products.
The main advantage of selling your own product is that you have ultimate control on your profit margins because you control both the costs and the selling price. If you’re selling other people’s products, you’ll not be able to determine the costs and sometimes not even the selling price.
Selling physical products may or may not require you to set up your own website. Of course you can choose to do what Julie Swatek has done, which is selling your products through your own online store.
If you choose not to set up your own website, what you can do is to sell your products on eBay – the world’s largest online mall.
It’s free to open an account on eBay. You pay them a fee only when you sold an item. The fee is based on a small percentage of the sale price transacted.
The greatest advantages in selling on eBay are that you don’t have to set up the mechanisms required of an online store, and they have an endless stream of ready buyers visiting their website every day.
But I’d still suggest you set up your own website eventually. You may start selling on eBay first, but it’ll be better to have your own online store after you’ve been successful with eBay so that your business won’t be held captive by them.
Moreover, if you’re successful on eBay, you’d already have ready traffic to drive to your own website. Traffic is one of the most critical elements that’ll determine whether you win or lose in your Internet business.
2. Sell Drop Ship Products
Let me explain drop shipping using an example.
Let’s say you’ve decided to set up an online store selling health supplements. Instead of renting a warehouse space to store your inventory, you make a drop ship arrangement with your supplier (the drop ship supplier) to ship the products directly to your customers.
Once you receive an order from a customer through your online store (either your website or your eBay store), you send an email to the supplier with your customer’s order and address. The supplier will then packs and ship the order to your customer for you.
The best part of this business model is the supplier will pack and ship one product at a time to your customer and they’ll even put your company name, logo and address on the product so your customer will never know the product didn’t come from you!
So how do you profit from the deal?
A drop ship supplier is a discount wholesaler. They’ll charge you the wholesale price – even for one product at a time – and you’ll charge your customer the highest possible price you can place on the product in accordance to the retail marketplace. The price difference will be your profit.
What about the shipping and handling charges?
It’s a standard practice that the customer pays for the shipping and handling fee. If your supplier charges you a $10 fee, then you simply pass on that cost to your customer.
So where can you find a drop ship supplier?
The best way is to ask the manufacturer of the products to connect you with one. Most manufacturers would have at least a few drop ship wholesalers distributing their products.
Another way is to look through trade magazines to find distributors for the type of products you wish to sell. Just go to Google or Yahoo! and key in the search phrase ‘trade magazines’ to find a related trade magazine.
You may also want to check out drop ship directories where they provide lists of thousands of drop ship distributors. The directory with the best reputation I can point you to is World Wide Brands.
3. Sell Your Service
This is probably the easiest way to get started because you’re in essence selling a skill you already possess such as book-keeping, accounting, programming, web designing, legal consulting, copy writing, events planning, etc.
Nevertheless, in most cases, your revenue potential is limited to how much time you physically have to provide the service to your customers.
The main advantage of selling your service is that you don’t have to deal with inventory, packaging, product wear & tear, and shipping & handling. But your sales strategy should remain very much the same as selling physical products.
And also, to sell your service online, you don’t need to start with your own website, not even an eBay store.
There are many online service marketplaces such as Elance.com, Guru.com and RentACoder.com, where you can post your service for engagement by interested parties.
These online marketplaces serve to provide the platform to connect businesses with freelance professionals locally, nationally, and internationally.
But if your intention were to turn it into a serious business, then you’d have to set up your online office – your own website – to establish a more business like image.
4. Sell Affiliate Products (Affiliate Marketing)
Perhaps the best way to get started online is to start promoting other people’s products. That way, you don’t have to source for a reliable supplier or create your own products. The best part is you don’t even need to personally handle the buyers!
To be an affiliate marketer, you’d have to join one or several merchants’ affiliate programmes and promote their products either simply through online advertising (no website required), or through your own website and/or blog.
When someone clicks on your advertisement or the affiliate links on your website, lands on the merchant’s website, and makes a purchase, then you’ll earn a commission out of that sale.
In order for the merchant to know that the buyer is referred by you, a unique “affiliate URL” will be assigned to you when you sign up for the merchant’s affiliate programme.
For example, if you click on the links on this blog (the pictures you see on the side bar on the right or the blue underlined words), lands on another website, makes a purchase from that website, then I’ll earn a commission from that sale. Got it?
Affiliate marketing can be extremely lucrative as the start up costs is low, but the margins can be incredibly high.
Some affiliate programmes offer their affiliates commission as high as 50-75% of each sale transaction! And if you’re able to hit a certain target, you’ll even be offered bonus commission!
Of course there are merchants who offer low commission in the range of 10-30%. But the crux of affiliate marketing is to promote products from highly reputable merchants and it is best that you’re a direct consumer of the product you’re promoting. That gives your promotion or recommendation much more credibility.
To find out more about affiliate marketing, the best person to go to is Rosalind Gardner. She’s the affiliate marketing industry equivalent of an A-list Hollywood star.
5. Sell Advertising Space
To sell ad space, you definitely need to set up your own website or a blog. In order to attract advertisers to place banner ads or text link ads on your website, you’ll need to generate a lot of highly targeted traffic coming to your site because advertisers will only pay for advertisements that reach a large number of highly targeted leads.
And to generate a high traffic to your website, you’ll need to build a content rich website where people will want to keep coming back.
Creating a blog to provide valuable information for free is one of the best ways to attract visitors and constant updates of your blog content is the way to keep them coming back.
But before you’re able to generate enough traffic to attract advertisers, you can start with placing Google ads on your website by joining the Google Adsense programme.
Once you’ve joined the programme, Google will place small relevant ads on your website. Let’s say if your website is about dog training, Google will place ads in relation to dogs such as dogs food, dogs grooming, dogs training schools and so on.
Whenever someone clicks on these ads on your website, you’ll be paid a small commission by Google.
6. Sell On-Demand Merchandise
This is perhaps a lesser-known Internet business model of all. So far, no expert Internet Marketer has produced a guide or a course on how to profit from this model and there’s not lot of information about it available yet.
Nevertheless, I’ll do my best to explain to you how this works.
The most popular on-demand merchandise website is CafePress.com. You can select any category of products available on that website and have those products imprinted with your specially designed graphics.
You can then set up an online store through the website and sell your custom-designed products.
The advantages of this business model are that CafePress.com:
• Provides you a FREE online store to sell your products. Premium store is also available at a low monthly fee.
• Produces each item when ordered using their print-on-demand technology.
• Handles all order and fulfilment.
• Handles all the customer service.
• Sends you a monthly cheque for your earnings on sales.
Of course you don’t expect to use their services for free. They will charge you a base price for the products you’re selling and in turn, you charge your customers a retail price based on a mark-up over the base price.
For example, CafePress charges a base price of US$10.99 for a plain white mug. You could then have your graphic printed on it and sell at whatever price you wanted above the base price.
If you decide to charge US$15.99 for the mug with your custom-designed graphic, then CafePress would keep the US$10.99 and they’ll pay you the US$5 mark-up.
Perhaps you could tell from the example given above that their base price is relatively high compared to a wholesaler. This is the disadvantage of selling on-demand merchandise. Your profit margin is very limited.
And because of the limited profit margin, you need to sell a large number of products in order to make a decent income.
7. Sell Other People’s Products with Resell Rights, Master Resell Rights, or Private Label Rights (PLR)
To kick-start your Internet business right away, you can choose to purchase the resale licences to an already existing product and sell the product to keep 100% of the profits from each sale.
There are different types of rights which you can buy. Resell Rights is the most basic of all types of resale licences. When you purchase a product with a resell right, it allows you to sell the product as is.
The second type of resell rights is the Master Resell Rights. This resale licence not only allows you to sell the product as is, it also allows you to sell the Resell Rights to your buyers.
That means your buyers actually purchase the Resell Rights from YOU. Once they make the purchase, they’ll have the right to sell the product as is, but they can’t sell the Resell Rights.
Master Resell Rights is more costly than just Resell Rights, but you can sell the product and the Resell Rights as a package for a higher price too.
The most expensive of all rights is the Private Label Rights. This resale licence gives you the benefits of the Master Resell Rights, plus you can alter the contents of the product in any way you desire. You can even claim yourself as the creator of the product.
The most common products that offer such rights are ebooks and software. You can check out the following 2 sources for products with resell rights.
8. Sell Digital Products
The single most profitable thing you can sell online is your own digital aka electronic product. Here are a few reasons why:
• Production and distribution costs are greatly reduced while raising overall efficiency. With new technologies, it is extremely easy and cheap to produce digital information without having to hire a large crew and a studio.
• Buyers can simply download them online within minutes of purchasing the information. You don’t have to worry about stocking, packaging and shipping.
• Not only are the costs low, profit margins for digital information is almost 100 per cent! People are not paying for bits and bytes, a bunch of CDs or paper & ink they are paying for the value of the information.
• Products can be updated without a lot of retooling or manufacturing. That again means low cost or even no cost!
• A business system can be set up to allow the business to work on autopilot so that it’s running 24/7 and help you make money while you are sleeping!
• You get paid over and over again for work you do one time. Once you create your information products, you can keep selling it over and over again. The work is done one time and you repeatedly profit from it. That’s incredible leverage so your income is not tied to the number of hours you work.
Now you may be asking, “What are the digital products I can sell?”
There are a few options for you:
a) eBooks
This simply means electronic books. Instead of a physical book, an eBook usually comes in PDF format which can be downloaded and read on your computer screen. Alternatively, you can print it out to read.
Don’t worry if you think you cannot write a book. I know it may sound like a daunting task but the fact is, you don’t have to be a great writer to be a best selling author.
The best way to do it is to interview people of authority in a particular industry, transcribe the interviews and compile the information into an eBook.
For more detailed information on how to create your own eBook, get a copy of How to Write and Publish Your Own eBook in As Little As 7 Days by Jim Edwards and Joe Vitale.
b) Information products in video or audio format
Instead of an eBook, you can produce an audio book. If you’ve got a good voice, you can record your own narration of the book you’ve produced. Otherwise, you can hire someone as the narrator.
Many big time authors are already doing this because it’s cheap and easy to produce but it commands a higher perceived value so you can sell it at a higher price than a normal eBook.
A good example is Adam Khoo who has produced his own audio programmes such as the Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires, Patterns of Excellence and Paving the Way to the Top.
If you want to learn the simple way to create your own info products, check out Marlon Sander’s Info-Product Dashboard.
c) Software
You do not need to be a programmer to develop your own software. All you need is a good idea for a software programme and you can hire a programmer from Elance.com or RentACoder.com to help you.
The most important aspect is that your software must help to solve a problem that people are facing and they’re willing to pay for it.
Besides the big gun software like Photoshop, Microsoft Words/Excel, Dreamweaver, Norton Antivirus, etc, there are literally hundreds of other lesser-known software in the market that are making their creators loads of money.
Some examples are:
• XSitePro
XSitePro is a website building software like FrontPage and Dreamweaver, but it is specially designed and created for Internet Marketers.
This is a proprietary technology that display a small animated “Peel” on the top right corner on a website. If you want a clearer picture of how it works, simply click here.
LaughingBird is a software company that offers software that create logos, flip books, eBook covers, business cards, web graphics and flash ads.
• eBookPro
eBookPro is a software that helps you create an eBook with security features.
Build A Niche Store (BANS) is a store/website development platform which enables you to create content based sites that generate income through the eBay affiliate programs.
These examples are proof to you that you do not need a revolutionary idea and a big budget to develop your own proprietary software. You just need to be more observant and listen to what people are complaining about to generate a good idea.
So there you go! This is the BRIEF run through on Internet Marketing that I’m giving you.
I know this is a pretty long article (more than 4,000 words) but to tell you the truth, what I’ve shown you here is just the very basic of Internet Marketing. This is only the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
As mentioned earlier, starting an Internet business does require time, commitment and a lot of hard work. There’s no get-rich-quick scheme in this world. Everything requires work.
However, the returns of all the hard work could be tremendous. If you’d set up the system properly to run it, it can be an extremely lucrative passive income.
Ok… The next millionaire secrets lesson will be Growing Your Money. So stay tuned!
Cheers~
P.S. If you’re seriously going to set up your own Internet business, you’re going to need help. So do yourself a favour by learning how to do it the right way.
Go get a copy of the Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet. You’ll get a great deal of ‘meat’ from it.
But if you prefer to make money through a blog, then Blog Mastermind is the way to go.
If you like what you’ve read so far, come back for more! Or simply subscribe to my feed.
Related Posts You Should Read
on Dec 22nd, 2008 at 9:16 pm
I finally decided to write a comment on your blog. I just wanted to say good job. I really enjoy reading your posts.
on Dec 23rd, 2008 at 3:29 am
Hi Dan,
Thank you for finally deciding to write a comment and I’m glad you enjoyed reading my posts. Hope to see you around often.
Cheers~
Mark
on Aug 1st, 2009 at 2:12 am
[...] suggest starting a home-based business such as an Internet business (e.g. Blogging) while holding on to your day job. It’s low cost, therefore, low risk. Who knows? [...]