This is a great question. Many bloggers–myself included–run promotions for both our own and other products on a regular basis. Some blogs are heavily promotional, with an affiliate link in nearly every post, whereas other bloggers make their money mostly through advertising and only rarely include affiliate links in their posts.

First, let’s look at things from a blogger’s perspective. Then, I’ll give you a few metrics to help you decide which marketers to follow online.

From a blogger’s perspective, affiliate revenue is often the only way to make a full-time income from a blog. My blog, as ranked by Alexa, is in the top 0.1% of all websites by traffic. Yet, as you’ve seen from my revenue numbers, I only make about $83/month from placing Google ads on my site.

So, for 99.99% of bloggers and website owners, ad revenue isn’t enough to even cover expenses, let alone provide a full-time income.

Enter affiliate marketing.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

With affiliate marketing, you get paid when you refer someone who buys something. With ads, you get paid every time someone clicks on the ad. Referring someone who buys something is often a better deal all around: the affiliate gets paid more; the product owner only has to pay when a sale is made; and the customer gets a product that he or she will hopefully love.

There are all kinds of affiliate programs: big ones like Amazon pay 4-8% for any product purchased through their site, and thousands of other ones pay out for anything from web hosting to ebooks to coaching programs. Pretty much anything you can think of that is sold online has some sort of affiliate program.

The reason affiliate programs are so popular on blogs is that the commissions on big products can add up fast. Often, information products that sell from anywhere from $200 to $2,000 or more pay out a whopping 50%–and that doesn’t include bonuses. If you’ve seen Internet marketing websites promoting big $2,000 products from well-known names like Jeff Walker or Eben Pagan, they’re getting paid more than $1,000 per sale!

There isn’t anything inherently bad about affiliate marketing. It allows website owners and bloggers to make a full-time income online without having to drive millions of visitors to their websites every month. And it drives a whole lot of sales for publishers, manufacturers, and service companies.

But affiliate marketing does have its dark side. Take my most recent income numbers, for example. I made a list of the top affiliates for Profit Instruments, and immediately my email inbox got pounded by other marketers looking for me to promote their “make money online” products.

The Big Problem with Affiliate Marketing

Right on the heels of a successful promotion, you suddenly become aware of how much money there is to be made. This is where most marketers lose their integrity. I’ve seen it time and time again. Someone gets a nice list going of thousands of people who really listen to his or her advice. The list owner promotes a good product. All of a sudden, 5 figures of income rolls in.

Unfortunately, that income is mostly one-time income. Next month, the list owner starts back over at 0. So what does he or she do? Promote again, of course! And since he’s been inundated with new offers, it’s easy to promote something in the same niche. Rinse and repeat.

The problem with constant promotion is it “burns your list.” People who were used to receiving good content suddenly get hammered with sales pitches. So they stop opening your emails. And now you, as the affiliate marketer/list owner, are in a race. You have to constantly find more people to join your list so you can continue your sales pitches and make more money.

Internet Marketing’s Dirty Secret

Here is the Internet marketing world’s dirty secret: Replicable success is hard. A one-time success–selling something and making 5 or 6 figures–is easier than doing it repeatedly. Most marketers only see dollar signs and don’t have any clue how to build a relationship with their list. And building a relationship with your list–delivering good content again and again, without constantly asking for the sale–is difficult.

The relationship you have with your list is the cornerstone of building a successful business. As a blogger, it’s about learning to say “no” 99 times out of 100 to people who ask you to promote a product. It’s about giving up some money now in order to build the relationship down the road. And if you want to know why most Internet marketers, over time, don’t make it, this is why: They go for the quick buck over the relationship.

Finding the Genuine Marketers

So, to go back to Richard’s question: How do you tell when someone is all about making money vs. truly helping someone? You have to look at the persona they project. When you opt in to their email list, what sort of emails do you get from them on a regular basis? What percentage of the emails that you receive from them contain nothing but a sales pitch? If it’s 80% or more, I suggest unsubscribing from that list.

Yes, what I just said may annoy some Internet marketers. But if the list owner doesn’t take the time to write real content, deliver free teleseminars or webinars to help you, and if every email is a sales pitch, where is the value? You might as well be subscribed to an email list of the latest Google ads. Unsubscribe from those lists. Let’s collectively raise the bar on who we allow to sell products to us.

A good marketer acts as a filter between his or her audience and the product pushers. He turns down most products people ask him to promote. She promotes only the best products–those she truly believes will help her audience. And his emails to you are mostly good, thoughtful content.

There are thousands of bloggers and marketers who fit this profile. A majority of their content is helpful. Some of their content has sales pitches, but the sales pitches show a true interest in the product, not a copy-and-paste “XYZ made 20 zillion dollars and you can too…by tomorrow!” sort of pitch. They don’t promote every “big” launch. In general, they put relationships over sales–without forgetting that sales is what puts food on the table.

These are the people I encourage you to do business with.

Your Challenge for Today

Your challenge for today: If you’re subscribed to any email lists where you haven’t received any real content in months–just sales pitches–I encourage you to unsubscribe. Yes, even if you like the product or person. Raise the bar on who you do business with. Your credit card will thank you.

And if you’re a marketer: Today is the day you should write some real content, or shoot a video, that has NO sales pitch whatsoever. Maybe you can take the time to publicly answer a reader’s question, or share a quick tip you’ve learned that you know will help your list. Tell your list “Thank you” and let your readers know that you honor them. Your readers will appreciate you that much more.

Recommended Reading:

• Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook. Looking to get started with affiliate marketing? Rosalind’s book is the definitive guide. (I’ll be doing a full review soon.) Check it out now!
• How Do All Those “Idiots” Make So Much Money? Does it drive you nuts that some idiot with a terrible product seems to be constantly making sales, when you know your product is better? What’s the difference between you and that “idiot”?
• 20 Scam-Free Ways to Make Money Online Fast. My huge list of real ways to make money online.

oDesk review from a real user. Does oDesk work?

I’ve definitely had success outsourcing jobs online. In this blog post, I’ll show you which tasks I recommend you outsource, how much you can expect to pay, and where to find good workers. When you’ve read this post, you can immediately take action and start taking some work off your own shoulders.

Step 1: Determine What Your Priorities Are.

As a blogger, my #1 priority is content creation. Though some people outsource content creation, I don’t. Every post you see on erica.biz (that isn’t a guest post) is written by me, and I star in all my own videos!

That’s what I don’t outsource. But around that, there are hundreds of hours of work I do outsource.

If you’re a blogger and feel overworked, the first thing I would recommend you outsource are menial blog tasks. You shouldn’t be upgrading your own plugins, tweaking themes, or upgrading WordPress to a new version. Let a worker handle that for you. I outsource all of that for $30/hour, though you can find workers to do it for even less.

If you’re still moderating comments by hand as a blogger, the first thing I’d do is to kick yourself. Ouch! There. This is one of the easiest tasks to outsource. Your time as a blogger is far more valuable than that!

Other things I outsource include video editing, audio editing (especially important for podcasters!), bookkeeping (keeps those accountant fees down!), transcription, Internet research (great for “10 ways to…” content), and programming tasks.

Thinking about what your priorities are should allow you to see at least one routine task you can outsource. Start there.

Which Freelancing Site is Better?

I’ve used eLance, RentACoder, and oDesk. Of the three, I vastly prefer oDesk.

Elance charges a minimum of $50 for project tasks, and a $5 minimum per hour. This alone makes eLance a complete waste of time for me. Often the tasks I want to outsource will only take 30 minutes or so, and many of the bids are far lower than $5 per hour.

RentACoder is great for finding talented programmers, but the interface is cumbersome and they encourage you to make the bids per-project instead of hourly. My preference is to pay hourly. I have used RentACoder successfully, but the interface bugs bothered me.

They also force you to communicate through their buggy system. For instance, when I was using it, every time I wrote a comma, it would delete the rest of my post. For a system written by programmers, I was amazed it had those bugs. They fixed that bug a few days later, but I was already used to editing out all my commas. Blech!

After using both those sites, as well as oDesk, I found myself coming back to oDesk repeatedly for a few reasons:

1. oDesk lets you see what your employee is doing–it takes screenshots of their computer every so often, and shows their level of activity (i.e. are they idle or actually working?) That way you know you’re getting someone who is actually motivated to work.
2. There’s no minimum bid or minimum per-project amount. I’ve hired freelancers who have billed me $7 for a couple hours of work. oDesk bills your credit card once a week, and manages all the payments to providers. If you have a dispute, there is a dispute resolution process. I used their dispute resolution process once and managed to get all my money back, so I’m happy with that.

Step 2: Write Your Job Description.

When you first set up oDesk, it will charge your credit card $10.00. That’s to make sure you’re legit. You can then use that $10.00 credit to hire your first employee!

The next step is to post a job. Keep in mind that the more specific you are in your job request, the better off you will be. A common mistake is to want to hire one person for everything. Hire for a specific, small job first. Then, when you’ve found the right person for that job, either expand what you want that hire to work on or hire another person for your next task.

In your job description, explain the task, then ask the provider to do something specific to make sure he or she has understood what is involved.

Here’s one I posted a couple months ago:

“Looking for someone who can do some research online and generate a list of 50 blogs that accept guest posts.

You MUST understand what a guest post is and how to tell which blogs accept them in order to be hired for this task!

To be considered, please send with your application one blog URL that accepts guest posts. Can be any blog — any topic — it is just so that we are both clear that you understand what the assignment is.

Assignment will need to be completed within 14 days; please do not apply if you are not available at this time.

Thank you,
-Erica”

I stated my requirements specifically, and asked them to prove that they had read the job description and were qualified for the job by giving me an example.

The great thing about oDesk is that applicants start coming in in just a few minutes. For simple jobs, you’ll get 15-20 qualified people in 20 minutes. For more complex jobs, you’ll likely have a qualified person or two within a day!

Typically, for the less complex jobs, I hire someone within an hour.

Step 3: Picking the Right Person

Since you’ve added a requirement in your job description, anyone who doesn’t meet the requirement should immediately be out. I also look at previous tasks the person has performed. I don’t take a risk on a new oDesk person; I want to see that he or she has done similar tasks in the past.

Ratings can be staged a bit, so a person who has all 5-star ratings still may not do a great job. However, the more similar jobs the person has done in the past and the better ratings he/she has, the more likely he or she will do your job well.

I usually look for someone who writes English pretty well in the application and who has met my specific requirements. I don’t usually pick the cheapest or the most expensive. And I tend to be biased toward the Philippines since I’ve hired so many amazing workers from there.

Step 4: Communicating with Your Employee

I usually hit “Interview” with 2-3 people and ask for their Skype usernames and whether they can interview right away. I communicate with all my employees via Skype text chat. I love Skype because it shows me what time it is in their time zone. It’s a free download, so there’s no excuse to not have it.

Whoever replies back the fastest and I can get on Skype gets the job. Usually, the person can start right away. I relay the job description again and make sure he/she understands. I remind the employee that I am available for questions if needed. I then send any files that are required either via email or Skype.

If it’s a long task, I ask for the employee to do one piece first, and then send it to me, so I can make sure it’s being done properly. For instance, for the above task, I asked my employee to send me 10 blogs, formatted in a spreadsheet as I requested, first. Once he had sent those, I gave the green light for the rest of the project.

Step 5: Closing and Leaving Feedback

Once the employee has completed the task, it’s time to close the task and leave feedback. If you have any issues with the employee, try to bring it up first instead of just leaving negative feedback.

In general, the employee will complete the task. Your next step is to close the task on oDesk. oDesk makes it simple to re-hire someone, so don’t hesitate to close the task unless you immediately have more work for the person.

To close a task, go to My Jobs -> Assignments, then click on the task and click End Assignment. Then rate the person. I like to add a bit of feedback as to what they did to help future providers, too. For instance, I might write “Great work inputting all the data into the Excel spreadsheet and then emailing it to my clients!” This lets future providers know that this person knows how to work with spreadsheets and email.

Conclusion: Is Outsourcing Worth It?

In general, using oDesk has worked out great! I’ve found many amazing workers, and only one truly bad one (a PHP programmer I fired after he had spent just a few hours working with me.)

I’ve hired people for a total of 387 hours of work on oDesk–that’s a lot of time I’ve saved!

It’s definitely worth a shot. You don’t have a whole lot to lose–since you can expect to pay $3-$10/hour for most basic work, it’s low-risk if you hire someone and he/she doesn’t work out. Since you’re starting with basic tasks and expanding from there, you can quickly gauge if a person is competent. And, if someone doesn’t work out for whatever reason, you can simply “End Assignment” and start a new job with new candidates.

I encourage you to try this route if you have any rote work that needs to be done that you’re currently doing yourself.

“But Isn’t This Exploitation?”

I’ve posted about outsourcing before, and I always tend to get comments about how I’m “exploiting” workers.

oDesk, and other outsourcing sites, are not exploitation. A worker has to actively apply for a job. No one is putting a gun to that worker’s head and saying “Apply for jobs online, darn it!”

A lot of the background of this theory, though, is that $3/hour (or less in some cases) “seems” exploitative to us. After all, most Americans couldn’t live on that wage.

To illustrate my point of view, let’s take a typical American named Craig and give him a $30,000/year salary. Now let’s place him in my hometown of Brookville, Indiana. Craig can live pretty well on $30,000/year. He can buy a 3BR, 2ba house on 1/4 acre of land (~$80,000), go out to the Dairy Cottage for some good fried chicken, and afford a decent car–you need one there, because the nearest Wal-Mart is 20 miles away. But overall, Craig will live a pretty happy life!

In fact, Craig’s salary is pretty close to the median household income of folks who live in Brookville: $32,670/year.

Now let’s put Craig in San Francisco. $30,000/year is painful to live on in San Francisco–I speak from personal experience! Tax rates are much higher, including a whopping 9.5% sales tax. Craig won’t be able to afford a house on 1/4 acre; he’s probably stuck sleeping on someone’s couch or living in a bedroom that was once a closet and sharing a house with several others. He probably won’t be able to afford a car–fortunately, he probably won’t need one. With lunch costing $9.25 for a sandwich, he’ll probably learn to cook. Craig probably feels poor compared to his other friends in San Francisco; San Francisco’s median income is $65,519.

In the Philippines, the median annual income is 111,000php, or about $2,450/year in U.S. dollars. Our friend Craig could live like a king there (and, in fact, many Americans do choose to retire to lower-cost countries like the Philippines and Thailand.) Divide it out into an hourly rate, and you’ll find it’s about $1.18/hour–which means people earning $3/hour are similar to folks earning $60,000-$90,000 annually in the U.S.

Of course, “middle class” means different things to different people, and you’ll likely find a “middle-class” lifestyle in the Philippines to be far different than here in the U.S. But the important thing to note is that none of these people feel exploited. In fact, they’re thrilled to have the opportunity to prove their worth, and they are some of the nicest people you’ll ever have the pleasure of working with.

I know outsourcing can be a touchy subject, but I use this story to help you break through your own barriers. We know you wouldn’t work for $3/hour, but a sandwich doesn’t cost $6 in the Philippines, either. It’s all a matter of perspective. Should you still have concerns, I encourage you to spend time in third-world countries. See for yourself the type of people you’re giving opportunities to. It will change your perspective entirely.

Outsourcing is great for you, but equally great is giving other people an opportunity to share in your success. It will help you double the amount of work you can do and deliver even more to your clients and prospects. And when you find the right people, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them!

Give outsourcing a shot today. You have nothing to lose. Get started with oDesk.

Have a question on outsourcing? Ask me in the comments!

Recommended Reading:

• Five Steps to Freedom: How to Outsource. In my earlier post on outsourcing, I show how to outsource common household tasks, like cooking and cleaning, to make your life easier.
• oDesk. Set up an account today and get started outsourcing. It’s painless.

I don’t use a costly system. In fact, my initial investment was about $6: Several notebooks at Big Lots–a closeout store. (Here are the same notebooks on Amazon.)

Below are some questions and answers showing exactly how I use this system. If you have additional questions after reading this, please feel free to post them in the comments.

Q: Why/how did you decide to use this system?

I want to do something productive to move my business forward every day. Running a business is a marathon, not a sprint. Doing 1-2 hours of productive, creative work every day will do amazing things to help your business grow. By keeping my task list simple and filled with tasks that are both creative and productive, I know I’m moving in the right direction. And there’s nothing like flipping through pages of crossed-off to-do items to make me feel like I’ve really accomplished something.

This to-do system may sound deceptively simple, but the reality is that having my notebook open and beside me at all times motivates me like nothing else. I can immediately look at it and pick one task and just start working. Without it, I would be lost–and I would probably resort to surfing the Internet a lot!

Q: How do you decide which tasks to put on your list?

At the beginning of the notebook, I leave space for big projects. (I typically organize these by month.)

Every Sunday night, I write a to-do list for the following week. Next to each item, I write an approximation of how many minutes it will take for each task.

Each week, I aim for 5 “big” tasks and 5-10 smaller tasks. I classify all tasks by the time I think they will take–in minutes. (This also forces me to get far better at estimating how much time each task will take.) You can see the time estimates in the picture below; “60+” means more than 60 minutes, or multiple hours. If I believe a task will take more than 2-3 hours, I will break it down into smaller tasks (e.g. “write blog post 60,” “edit and post blog post 45.”)

This week’s task list.

Q: Do you modify your list during the week?

The list isn’t sacred. I can–and do–modify it during the week. If an email comes in with a task that takes longer than 10 minutes, I write it down on the list. If it takes less than 10 minutes, I do it as it comes in.

Q: What do the circles around some of the dashes before the tasks, like “Pull together Problogger blog post,” mean?

This is how I denote “A task so large that I don’t need to do anything else that day.” If I clear that task in one day, I take the rest of the day off. That’s how I motivate myself to tackle bigger projects.

Q: You’re a geek. I’m surprised to see you using a notebook. Why not use a software-based task system?

One of the reasons I use a notebook and not a computer-based task system is that it was too easy in most systems to move tasks from one week to the next. With every computer-based system I tried, I ended up with a pile of stale tasks at the bottom of my list that grew larger over time. That was incredibly demotivating.

With my notebook, I start fresh every week. When I do my Sunday night writing-down of tasks, I manually copy tasks from last week to this week. I use that time to consider why tasks didn’t get done. Sometimes I simply run out of time or energy to get everything completed. But other times I realize that there is a draining task I really don’t want to do on the list. If a task remains on the list for more than two weeks, I generally either outsource it or forget it. This notebook, then, is a perfect way to see what I need to outsource next in my life–as well as what’s not important to me.

I don’t write 100 tasks on my to-do list. Bigger projects go at the beginning of my notebook or in a mind map.

If I get everything on the list done for the week, I take the rest of the week off. This is rare, but it does happen…and I make sure to never pile more things on my list just because I am done with my tasks for the week. I reward myself with a day or two off instead.

Q: Why do your task list on Sunday night and not Monday morning?

In Jack Canfield’s book The Success Principles (which I highly recommend reading), he suggests adding tasks and looking over your to-do list before you go to bed so your subconscious can figure out the most effective way to do your tasks while you sleep.

I find I also sleep dramatically better with my to-do list out of my head…I don’t get awakened with any thumping heart, “oh my gosh I need to…!” moments. If my mind insists on going over a task I have on the list, I remind it that I already have that task written down, and my brain quiets so I can go to sleep.

I have been known to get out of bed and write tasks down in my notebook so I don’t forget them. (Same with blog post ideas!) It’s worth the two minutes of getting out of bed so you can sleep better at night.

Q: Do you recommend this system to everyone?

Everyone is different. This is the system that works for me. I happen to know that this system, or a similar one, also works for many others. (I sent J.D. Roth over at Get Rich Slowly a link to this video, and he loved it so much that he started using a similar system!)

You may or may not like this system; that’s fine. What’s important is that you have a system. Never turn on your computer without knowing what you want to accomplish; there are so many time-sucking programs and websites that you can spend hours on without ever really doing anything. Having a system helps to ensure that when you do decide to work, you get the most important things done.

Have questions? Want to share your own system? Feel free to leave a comment!

Recommended Reading:

• The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. If you read one personal development book, I’d recommend this one. Canfield summarizes at least 20 other personal development books. I pulled a ton of insight from this book.
• How to Make a Mind Map. This is how I make larger projects come to life!
• The notebook I use. Here’s a link to the notebook I use; via Amazon.com.

That would be pretty awesome…wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, such a device doesn’t exist (at least as far as I know!) However, you can get pretty close to reading potential customers’ minds with the two methods I describe below…and if you’re anything like most business owners, you’ve probably never tried either one of these. Use both, and you may just be unstoppable…

The key to running a successful business is to align your talents and skills with something that people will pay good money for. It doesn’t matter how awesome your product or service is if no one will pay for it. And often, what we think people would pay for is totally off base. So how do we figure out what problems people will pay us to solve? Here are two ways–that are slightly less invasive than reading people’s minds!

1: Talk to people who are a part of your market.

This can seem initially scary or daunting, but that shouldn’t stop you from doing it. First, narrow down your business idea to a sentence or two, then ask them for their opinion on it. Pretty much everyone is open to giving an opinion.

If they respond with a neutral or negative reaction, ask them what they would pay for instead. The key word is pay for. Sure, it would be nice to have someone who goes out and gets a drink for you from the fridge every time you want it, but how much would you pay for that? These are all valid questions, and it’s perfectly okay to ask someone how much they would pay for your service.

If the answer is less money than you’d hope to earn from performing that service or selling that product, you have two options:

• Increase the value. Can you bundle your product with something else or add additional benefits? Again, this is something to ask your potential customer about. What would they pay extra for?
• Abandon the idea. This isn’t the worst-case scenario. In talking to your potential customers, you may come up with an even better idea, or decide this isn’t a target market you want to sell to. Better to fail fast than to have spent months trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. If this just doesn’t feel right, move on. Ideas are abundant!

If, on the other hand, your potential customer gives you a positive response with a price that you can live with, you may have a winner! Talk to other potential customers first–if several respond positively, then it’s time to invest further in this business.

2: Add the Google keyword tool to your arsenal.

I love the Google keyword tool. I’ve been known to spend hours on it. I use it for everything from blog post titles to forming entire businesses. And…it’s the closest thing to reading people’s minds as you’re going to get without tapping directly into their brain.

What is the Google keyword tool? It’s a free tool that lets you see what people are typing into Google. And it’s a gold mine–the #1 business research tool I use by far.

You can type in any word…I stick to common ones, like “business.” Sometimes I will add question words, like “how to”. (Typing in “how to business” gave me the inspiration for my post How to Start A Business with No Money, which ranked #1 in Google for “start a business with no money” for months!) You can also try “help” or “advice” to find people with problems that you might be able to help solve.

Once you’ve typed in your keywords, sort by “Global monthly search volume.” That’s, on average, how many people type that particular keyword into Google in a month. For blog posts, I generally target keywords with between 800-10,000 searches a month–more and it’s too competitive; less it’s not really worth optimizing for.

How I Came Up With the Business Idea for My Startup

I’ll let you in on a secret: The Google keyword tool is exactly how I came up with my idea for my new startup. I typed in “blogs” and noticed that nearly 250,000 people a month were searching for the keywords “best blogs”.

The next step is to look at what the search results are for the terms you find in the Google keyword tool. I typed “best blogs” (without the quotes) into Google and was disappointed with the results. Where was the dynamic, social site I was expecting? There wasn’t one. After a few months of thinking about it–the idea would not leave me alone!–I decided to create one.

It’s important to remember, too, that a business can’t exist in a vacuum. What is interesting and worth money to you may not be interesting (or worth paying for) to anyone else. Though this can hurt, it’s best to get it out of the way quickly so you can use your skills in a way that will benefit even more people–which will make your business grow faster.

To find inspiration for starting a business or creating a product, the best thing you can do is tap into what other people are thinking about–either by asking them directly, looking at what they type into Google, or, best of all: all of the above!

A Note About My Survey

This post was inspired by a reader question from my recent survey. Thank you to all of you who responded!

You may remember I promised 2 $10 Amazon.com gift cards to 2 lucky random survey-takers. I randomly selected and emailed the winners, who both claimed their gift cards. Thanks again–your responses were truly amazing, and should provide blog post fodder for many months to come!

Recommended Reading:

• This Simple Saying May Kill Your Next Business Idea. Most products aren’t anything completely new or unique–they’re just a different take on a product that is already out there.
• Are You Ready? One of the most powerful posts I’ve ever written–that you probably haven’t read.
• Are You Making This Common Mistake–That Could Ruin Your Business? I pinpoint one mistake I’ve seen over and over and share a true story of how it nearly killed a business.

It used to be, if you wanted to survey your customers or readers, you would have to pony up some hard-earned dollars for a paid online survey tool. In fact, many of these tools carry a monthly fee, and some don’t easily let you export your data–holding you (and your survey results!) hostage. That is no longer the case.

Video: Create Surveys for Free with Google Docs

With Google Docs, a free tool, anyone can create a good-looking survey. Your can accept results online, and have the results in a spreadsheet that you can then export to Excel or OpenOffice, or send to others as a spreadsheet.

Google Docs will generate the same great graphs that other survey tools will, and even supports advanced features like directing survey takers to certain “pages” of the survey based on their answers to previous questions.

I show you exactly how to set up your own free online survey in about 10 minutes with Google Docs in this step-by-step video:

[0:28] To get started, go to http://docs.google.com.
[1:15] Once you’re in to Google Docs, go to “Create New” and then click “Form”.
[1:28] Name your survey.
[1:51] A walkthrough of the various question types: Text; paragraph text; multiple choice; checkboxes; choose from a list; scale; grid.
[3:00] How to edit, duplicate, and delete a question.

[3:32] How to set up multiple pages and set up a “flow” for your survey so survey takers are directed to a different page based on their answer to a question.
[5:00] How to quickly move a question from one page of your survey to another.
[5:20] Editing the text that people see once they complete the survey.
[5:50] Save your survey.
[5:58] How to email your survey to others.

[6:10] How to embed the survey onto your blog or website–it’s so simple! This is one of my favorite features of the Google Docs survey tool.
[6:28] Select a theme (design) for your survey with a couple clicks.
[7:00] What it looks like once people respond to your survey.
[7:45] Showing the pretty graphs that the tool creates of all your responses.
[8:41] How to stop people from completing your survey once it’s over.
[8:55] How to export your survey to Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice, and other formats.

Next time you need to create a survey, try Google Docs. It’s free, allows (theoretically) unlimited responses, and is quite easy to use.

Tip for Business Owners and Bloggers:

If you’re running a business or a blog, I recommend surveying your customers/readers at least once a year, and preferably even more often than that. If you haven’t ever surveyed your customers, there’s no better time than the present–even if you only have a few of them. One or two more sales because you are able to offer additional services they need will more than pay back the small amount of time required to create a survey.

If you’re currently paying for an online survey tool, Google Docs has the potential to save you hundreds of dollars a year, so definitely check it out.

Enjoy!

Recommended Reading:

• My YouTube channel. Please subscribe there if you would like notifications of new videos I post.
• How to Make a Mind Map. My last how-to video, where I walk you step-by-step through another free online tool to create mind maps!

Do entrepreneurs need to attend college?

My answer is totally different: I don’t think college is beneficial for teenagers who already have a good idea of what they want to do with their lives, especially if they want to start a business.

Here’s my story…and some tips on whether college will be right for you:

My Background

My parents both have Master’s degrees. My father runs a law firm and my mom is a former school teacher. She raised me as a stay-at-home mom and then opened a title company when I was in grade school.

My mom was mortified when I slacked off in school, but school bored me. I am an extreme visual/hands-on learner; I have difficulty picking up information when it’s delivered in auditory format. I was often bored in school because I couldn’t pick up the information when someone spoke it to me, but I could read faster than everyone else, so while most people were sounding out words, I was already finishing the book.

I hated authority and constantly challenged my teachers. In first grade, I asked my teacher at lunch, “If the universe contains everything we know, and it’s constantly expanding, what is it expanding into?” She looked at me helplessly and tried her best to explain.

It was around that time that they seriously considered advancing me a grade. Persuaded by my mom, the principal put me in the third-grade reading class. I was testing at an eighth-grade reading level, but my social skills were woefully underdeveloped. I was not well-liked by the other kids.

Mom was constantly searching for other school options. We lived in a rural part of Indiana, with only one high school for the entire county, so my local options were limited. My parents considered sending me off to boarding school.

Attending a Different School

In the meantime, the state of Indiana was using its gifted-and-talented funding to start up a residential high school for juniors and seniors: the Indiana Academy. After touring it, I decided to go.

Living with other kids was a challenge, but I identified with many of them. I found more deep friendships there than I have in any other environment. It was there that I got introduced to computers and networking. (When I first got there, I tried to plug my dial-up modem into the Ethernet jack on the wall–I had never been exposed to networks before!)

I quickly became the de facto female computer geek. I managed 14 computers on the girls’ side of the school. I set up a web hosting company by colocating my old 486 desktop computer at an ISP; one of the teachers paid me to host his personal website. I ran several websites, one of which was a shareware ranking site that received a good deal of publicity.

When summer of my junior year came up, many of my classmates got jobs at local retail stores. I did something different: I went on Yahoo! and found the listings for local web design companies in Cincinnati, Ohio. I sent all of them (I think there were 20 or 30 at the time) an email asking if they needed a web person, and showing them several websites that I had coded myself. I landed two interviews and got a paying summer job at a web design company coding HTML and Perl.

By the time I was ready to graduate high school, I knew three things:

1. I wanted to go to Silicon Valley and seek my fortune.
2. I wanted to run a web hosting company and design/develop websites–the opportunity for “passive” income (I can confirm that’s a myth after 6 years of running one, but I didn’t know that then!) was hugely appealing to me.
3. I wasn’t going to graduate from college.

Of course, I wasn’t afraid to tell everyone who would listen about these three things. I remember most clearly telling the female computer science instructor that I would go to college because my parents wanted me to, but I wouldn’t graduate.

She was devastated. Then she started yelling. “You don’t understand the opportunities you have been given!” she said. “You’re throwing it all away. The women of my generation had to work so hard to even be in college, and you just want to give it up?”

I shrugged. It was pretty normal for teachers to be upset with me.

I mostly didn’t talk about it with my parents. My mom would get angry, which would cause my dad to leave the room. It was not a pleasant experience. I would go to college, and that was that.

No one could really tell me why college would be great for me. They all assumed I had to go. That there wouldn’t be any questions. That it was necessary to “open doors” for my future.

But was it necessary for someone who wanted to start her own business and who didn’t want a job? No one could answer that question.

Applying to College

I applied to only two colleges: San Jose State and Santa Clara University. Santa Clara University required an entrance essay. My dad encouraged me to write an essay that said I would donate to their alumni association when I became a millionaire CEO. (I didn’t quite put it that way, but I dropped some broad hints about how going to SCU would help me become more successful.)

Santa Clara sent me an acceptance letter. So did San Jose State.

My parents were willing to pay for Santa Clara, but I decided I wouldn’t go there because they didn’t let freshmen choose the hours for their classes. I wanted a part-time job while I was there (this was Silicon Valley in 1999, after all!), so I opted for San Jose State. I took a small class load and applied for a job.

Finding A Job

I scored a job without going in for an interview. I cattily left out the fact that I was 18 years old in the phone interviews, and was hired as a part-time Marketing Director for a small web company. When they found out I was 18, had no marketing experience, and was a college student, they were not amused. They fired me.

I found another job “being the helpdesk” and fixing computers for a small company, Cobalt Networks, that later became one of the largest IPOs in history. Sun Microsystems bought us out in 2000 for $2 billion, then killed the product line.

In the meantime, one of my college professors told me I should drop out of school and “seek my fortune” in Silicon Valley. It took me a year to follow his advice, but after 3 semesters of college, I dropped out.

My mom said it was the worst decision I had ever made. My boss at Cobalt, who treated me like one of his kids (his oldest was only a couple years younger than me), said I would regret it.

My boyfriend at the time, a well-paid techie “whiz kid” who was a high school dropout, congratulated me. (Interesting side note: The vast majority of the guys I have dated have not graduated from college. Several were high school dropouts. This wasn’t intentional; it’s just what happened.)

You probably know the rest of my story (if not, you can read it here, where I go into details of how I created a million-dollar business at a young age.)

How Can You Tell Whether You Should Go To College?

Let’s look at some facts:

• I knew what I wanted from a young age. I knew I wanted to start a web hosting company and do Web development. I went out and got summer jobs in that area to gain experience.
• I wasn’t waiting to be taught by classes. I was a self-taught computer whiz; infinitely curious, a voracious reader, and not afraid to ask questions. I didn’t seek permission to take over those 14 computers in my high school; I simply did it.
• School didn’t suit me well. I didn’t learn well from lectures, and I didn’t enjoy school. I did most of my learning from books and the Web. The Web, being 100% visual, was a miracle for me.

When I look at most high school kids, I understand why college is necessary. They don’t know what they want. They have a vague idea of the future, and college helps them clarify what they want to do with the rest of their lives.

I was totally different. I was goal-oriented, and more importantly, I had a goal (starting a business) that didn’t require a degree.

I will concede that I was different from most teenagers, but by no means do I think I am unique. I think there’s a good percentage of teenagers out there who want to start a business but who, like me, are pressured into going to college by their parents and teachers.

And really, what is that pressure but simple fear?

My Mom Concedes

After several years of not speaking to my mom much (but before I sold my business and would be considered a success), I finally called her and told her I was really upset with her. I mentioned the comment she had made about dropping out of college being the worst decision I had ever made.

She started crying, and told me that she was proud of me for taking the path she never had the courage to take. That conversation meant a lot to me, and it helped heal our relationship. And that’s honestly when I should have written this post, but I didn’t have the courage until now.

Going on a different path takes courage, but the rewards can be huge. Whatever you think you don’t have enough of–money, time, college degrees?–to start your own business, let me tell you right now: You have everything you need to succeed.

Was It Worth It?

I started my web hosting company when I was 20 years old. I had no clue what I was doing. I made huge mistakes. I underbilled my customers, overworked my employees, and pissed off a whole lotta people.

But I also made close friends, learned a whole heck of a lot, and oh yeah, made well over a million dollars.

I had the worst day of my life and the best day of my life in my office, with my employees. And I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

The people who tell you you need to go to college–they want the best for you. They want you to have the best chance of success. But sometimes, the real path to success lies in doing what no one else is doing. While everyone else is in school, you’re out there knocking down doors and closing deals, signing contracts, and trying to figure out who’s screwing you over and who’s investing in your success.

There’s nothing like it. And if you read this post and, like me as a teenager, are a self-starter, motivated to succeed, and ready to start your business, don’t let college stand in your way. Go out there and get your hands dirty. Yep, you’ll probably fail; most businesses do. But it will all be worth it, and you’ll have learned dramatically more in the process than you ever will sitting in a lecture hall waiting for class to end.

Recommended Reading:

• Hiring is Obsolete by Paul Graham. “While I stand by our responsible advice to finish college and then go work for a while before starting a startup, I have to admit it’s one of those things the old tell the young, but don’t expect them to listen to.”
• 15 Successful Entrepreneurs Who Didn’t Need College. Includes Michael Dell, Richard Branson, and Mary Kay Ash.
• One Thing You Don’t Need to Be An Entrepreneur: A College Degree by Fred Wilson (a venture capitalist.) His point of view: “I have learned that where someone went to college (or even if they didn’t go to college) has absolutely no correlation to whether they will be a good entrepreneur or not.”

Make money online fast —
20 REAL ways people make money online.

I have been reading A LOT and trying to learn as much as I can. I have run into conflicting stories, though. I just don’t know where to start. I am not a computer tech, nor that knowledgeable about how to start. I am NOT asking for a handout; just a helping hand in the right direction.

I’m not expecting to make tons of money today, but ANYTHING to help me get started in the right direction. I have saved thousands of lives and now I can’t even get through the month without running out of food!”

Cathy has the right attitude — she’s not looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, but instead a legitimate way to make some extra money online.

Having been sucked into some scams myself in the past, I know how difficult it can be to find real ways to make money online fast. Thus, I’ve compiled this list. Some ways require knowledge of certain skills, but all these skills can be learned. If you don’t know where to start, I suggest picking one of these ways and learning more about it, then trying it out!

Note: None of the 20 ways listed below contain affiliate links (that is, links that make me money if you click on them.) This list is for your benefit, not mine. Enjoy!

1. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Mechanical Turk is a great way to make some extra cash. You probably won’t make much more than a few dollars an hour, but it’s also dead simple to complete many of the tasks. Most tasks take less than a minute to complete and pay a few pennies. If you do a lot of MTurk, it could add up to at least some fun spending money. Sign up for free, then complete qualifications to earn access to higher-paying tasks.

2. Sell stock photos.

iStockPhoto is just one site that allows you to sell stock photos; there are others. Before you decide to go crazy and upload your whole album, take note of what’s selling well and try your hand at doing something similar. iStockPhoto also works for those who know how to render images; some of their most popular images were created on a computer! Have three killer stock photos ready for iStockPhoto’s inspection; they will want them when you sign up.

3. Sell stuff on eBay.

Start by selling your own extra stuff. Then, once you get a feel for selling your extra stuff, go door-to-door in nicer neighborhoods in your town. Develop an eye for what will sell and what won’t (old laptops, for instance, could be a gold mine–if you know how to format them to get rid of the previous owner’s personal data.) Sign a contract where you take 25-30% (or more) of the gross sale. Your customers will be happy to get cash for their old junk, and you’ll make some good money selling other people’s stuff. eBay

4. Become a freelance article writer.

It may not pay well, but there is a growing demand for this. Write 200-300 word articles and submit them to article directories. Potential clients include bloggers, marketers, and small businesses. You can write articles in a niche in batches and sell them as a package to one or more clients, or you can offer your services for hire per word or article and let your client give you direction. A foundation of keyword research is important to succeed at this job (unless you’re just taking direction from a client), but keyword research is learnable.

5. Write articles for magazines or other publications.

If you have a background in journalism, or just a passion for it, you can try your hand at submitting articles to publications. Don’t just randomly fire off articles, however; have a plan and, preferably, a contact at the publication you wish to submit to. The good news is that there are publications in pretty much any niche you can think of. To see some publications that are hiring, visit Online Writing Jobs, PoeWar Freelance Jobs, and Writing.com.

6. Transcribe audio files.

An easy job; doesn’t pay well, but also a quick way to make some money. Sign up on eLance or oDesk to start, and/or advertise your services in entrepreneur forums. Requires good hearing and a good command of the English language. You may also want to invest in a foot pedal if you plan to transcribe often. Make sure you know how to transcribe interviews before you start your first job.

7. Become a virtual assistant (VA).

There are entire books written on how to become a virtual assistant, so this job is definitely worthy of more research. My advice: Focus on one niche (I just hired Lisa Morosky of VA for Bloggers, for instance.) Also, reach out to potential customers directly and let them know what you can do for them instead of hitting up freelance web sites. Finally, you may want to consider resources such as AssistU, which provides training for up-and-coming virtual assistants.

8. Write articles on eHow.com.

If you understand the basics of keyword research, you can make a good monthly income from eHow. eHow pays you a percentage of the ad revenue they make from each “How to” article you create. You can crank out a few articles a day with relative ease. Try this for a month; assuming your article titles match up with what people are searching for in Google, you can make a significant income. The great news is that you write your articles once and get paid month after month. I’ve seen figures of $100-$150/month for 30 articles. Make money writing for eHow.com.

9. Do some videos to promote affiliate products.

Enjoy making silly videos? Even short, silly videos can sell products online. Find an product worth promoting that has an affiliate program, then target your video toward potential customers of that product. In your video summary on YouTube, place your affiliate link for the product, and after the video, do a 30-second still frame showing a short URL where people can buy the product. If your video is funny, informative, or useful, you may sell some products. Big tip: Try to promote a product that makes you a fair amount of money for each sale, but doesn’t cost a whole lot for the potential customer. You can find products on Commission Junction, for one.

10. Write an ebook targeted to people who need help.

Alexis Dawes created a product called “Desperate Buyers Only”. I interview her for an upcoming case study on Inspiring Innovators, where she mentions that she is able to make up to $97 from ebooks as small as 12 pages. The key? Finding people who are incredibly desperate for the information you provide and then doing good research to find a real solution to their problems. The result? Happy customers whose problem is solved, and money for you — a win-win situation! Caveat: It may be tough to find a real desperate buyer niche (Alexis reveals some in her case study). Here are some hints: When were you last in a situation where information would have either saved you a lot of money or a lot of pain? Has someone else close to you been in a situation where they could have used information to avert pain? Think legal, medical, and financial niches.

11. Build a small niche website.

Yes, you can make money online.I run a few small niche websites. For instance, How to Convert PDF is a tiny site that has free videos on how to convert other types of documents into PDF format. It sells a piece of software called PDF Creator, and I make a few dollars every time someone buys from that site. I promoted the site using pay-per-click ads and it was profitable. Don’t copy me directly, but do find the intersection of people needing help and a tool, ebook, or software program that will help them fix their problem. Then, create a website designed to get them to buy it!

12. Help local businesses develop an online presence.

Local businesses are struggling. Many have websites, but aren’t getting any results from them. Others don’t have websites at all. You can help by learning search engine optimization, how to set up an email list, and more, and then implementing these for local businesses. If you typically hang around geeks, web marketers, or the Web 2.0 crowd, you may be surprised how many business owners are 10 years (or more) behind you! If you can deliver results, business owners will happily pay. Find customers by going door-to-door.

13. Learn WordPress, then offer to install plugins and upgrade it.

I hired David from Web Geek 4 Hire to upgrade my blogs and install new WordPress plugins. He charges $5 to upgrade a plugin…great for him, since most plugins only take a few minutes to upgrade, and great for me, since if anything breaks, David gets to clean up the mess! You can make this a full time position; there is a ton of demand for these services. Find customers by contacting bloggers directly. Get references from bloggers who understand the value of outsourcing these tasks.

14. Become the go-to person for installations of a particular piece of software.

Anything from Amember to Quickbooks is fair game here. In the hosting industry, iDevAffiliate and Plesk Billing were the pieces of software we would have paid a lot of money to have someone else deal with. The more niche and more complex/annoying/frustrating the software, the better! Even if the software company offers free installation, you can make hundreds or thousands of dollars training business owners or their employees on its usage. Focus on one piece of software and become the trusted expert. Create videos and tutorials using screencast software like Camtasia to increase your profitability; this may also lead into a niche product that you can sell. (Amember offers “free installation”, but it took my boyfriend and I over 10 hours to configure it properly. That’s definitely something I would outsource next time!)

15. Interview other people and sell the interviews.

I experimented with this in 2008 and made over $800 from one interview. The key here is to understand a pain point that people are experiencing, interview an expert, and ask the expert the questions that the people experiencing the problem are having. Then create a small website and sell the interview. There’s more to this, including having good copywriting skills so your website sells the interview well, and knowing where to advertise, so don’t expect to immediately pull in hundreds of dollars. That said, it’s a neat way to quickly create a product. Get the interviews transcribed, then string a few interviews in the same industry together as a membership site or bundle that you can sell for more money.

16. Become a freelance “web geek.”

From configuring a shopping cart to installing and tweaking blog themes, there are virtually unlimited projects out there for geeks who enjoy working with small business owners to get them up and running online. Find people looking for web geeks on the Warrior Forum or other places where entrepreneurs gather.

17. Enter logo and design contests.

Fancy yourself a good designer? Try your hand at creating a logo or other design that a company loves! 99 Designs is the most popular marketplace. Beware, however; you won’t get paid unless your logo wins against many others, which makes many designers unhappy. In my opinion, this is a great way for a budding designer to build a portfolio and learn quickly what clients love.

18. Create Twitter backgrounds and e-covers.

Competition is stiff, but if you are a savvy designer, this is a good way to pick up extra dollars. Even better, if you are an artist, this is a good way to make your art skills pay off. Consider that every design will need to have a reason why the customer should buy the book or follow that person on Twitter to have a real impact. Twitter backgrounds, in particular, are in hot demand right now. For measurements and caveats of Twitter backgrounds, read “How to create your own Twitter background.”

19. Submit websites or blog posts to social media websites.

Not very exciting work, but in high demand from bloggers and small businesses. This involves setting up accounts on all of the social bookmarking services and then bookmarking your clients’ websites or latest blog posts to help them get more traffic. You may be competing against software that does this, but in many folks’ opinions, it’s better to have a real person do it. Even better is if you can goose your accounts with plenty of friends and become a star on a few of the services; then every site you bookmark has higher credibility and you can charge more. To get an idea of the social media sites you will need to sign up for, start at socialmarker.com.

20. Edit audio for others.

This is something that is fairly easy to learn and also in high demand. On Windows, one good program to edit audio is Sony Sound Forge. I use Sound Forge Audio Studio, but if you are doing this professionally, you might consider the upgrade to Sound Forge 9. Get the hang of editing out “um”s and “ah”s from audio. Even better is understanding the “flow” of an interview conversation and editing out portions that don’t make sense. Finally, learning to find and add intro music really gives podcasts that professional touch. Advertise your services on oDesk or eLance. I pay people to do this for the podcasts I am setting up on Inspiring Innovators, and it’s a job that can definitely be done from your house.

Which One Will You Try? Let Me Know…

There you have it…20 ways for you to make money online fast. Now it’s your turn! I’d like to know which of these methods you would like to hear more about. Please let me know by taking 30 seconds to post a comment below, and I will write more about the most-requested topics.

This post took approximately 6 hours to compile, including research. I’d appreciate it if you would support my efforts by Stumbling this post, bookmarking it on Delicious, and Digging it. Finally, if you are not already receiving my free business tips, jump on board! Every week I’ll send you a thought-provoking post about how to build your business and make more money. You won’t want to miss what I have in store for you… Get my free business tips!

Recommended Reading:

• How to Choose A Business. How do you choose which business (out of many ideas) you will actually run with? I discuss my strategy.
• Trouble Finding a Job? You May Have to Change Your Perspective. How one person found so much work she became unavailable, while many others in her same niche suffered through layoffs and low pay.
• Three Business Ideas That Thrive in A Recession. Want to start a business? Now may be the best time. Here, I give you some ideas on how to appeal to customers during this recession.

Here are four reasons why you should consider starting a blog:

1. Building relationships with a community of supportive readers.

One of my favorite examples of a blogger building a devoted following is Jim Klinge. Jim is a real estate agent with a specific focus — North County San Diego, CA. His office is based in Oceanside, a small city about 60 miles north of San Diego. He’s managed to build a following of several thousand subscribers, which has translated into countless commissions for his real estate agency.

What makes Jim different from all of the other real estate agents? First of all, most real estate agents don’t blog, so they miss out on the opportunity to attract people who don’t live nearby. Since I live in San Jose (about 8 hours north of San Diego by car), it’s unlikely I would ever meet a San Diego real estate agent. But through Jim’s blog, I can get to know him.

Jim has a unique personality that, in my opinion, is the epitome of a successful businessperson. He’s blunt and straight-shooting, yet obviously cares about his business and his clients. When potential clients come to him and want to sell a house, he gives them a range of prices to list in. If the client thinks their house is worth more, and refuses to compromise, Jim declines the sale offer. How many agents do you know who value honesty that much?

Jim’s blog is entertaining. He does funny video tours of houses, waxes philosophical about how he’d change the real estate business, and posts listings. He’s upfront about how much he thinks properties will sell for. The camaraderie on his blog shows — he has regular commenters, holds contests, and is patient with those who say they won’t buy yet.

Many business owners are aware of how important it is to develop a personal connection, but the key that many are missing is that it’s critical to be transparent. That means admitting that you, your company, and your industry aren’t perfect. Being a cheerleader won’t get you as much business as simply being honest and truthful will. Jim gets this, with the result being that if I ever want to buy a house in or near San Diego, he will be the first one I call.

2. Connections.

One of the biggest successes I’ve had from my blog is the ability to more easily land public speaking gigs. When I request a speaking gig, I simply point the people who run the conference to this blog, showing them posts like How I Turned My Mediocre Website Into a Million-Dollar Business. (I typically speak about building a successful business.) More often than not, I get the gig.

It’s also huge to build connections with other bloggers by guest-posting on their blogs. I save some of my best posts for guest posts on other blogs so I can gain exposure to a new audience. Building a relationship by writing great guest posts means that when it comes time to promote a new product I’m creating, I email these bloggers and they recognize me as someone who has helped them by guest posting on their site — not just another PR flack or face in the crowd.

These relationships will make me a lot more money in the future, and I also get an “in” to talk to others who wouldn’t otherwise be that interested in me!

3. Influence.

Having a blog is like owning your own small media outlet. Post your opinions on just about anything and you have a ready audience who will listen. Whether they agree or disagree, if your post provokes a reaction in them, you will get feedback.

You can easily build this influence into something bigger. Besides parlaying it into guest posts, you can write articles for magazines, get quoted in press releases, and — what may be the biggest benefit of being a successful blogger — use it to motivate others to change their lives in some useful way.

For instance, I know that many of you currently reading found my blog through patrick.net. I posted several articles about real estate (and will continue to post them!) that made it onto that website. From the visibility that I received from those articles, I estimate I’ve helped to convince over 1,000 people to save money by not buying a house. I have received many thank-you letters from those who saved thousands of dollars by waiting to buy a house. My website helped convince them — or, in some cases, their significant others! — to wait.

4. Money.

It should be obvious that having a blog will help you make more money — but the methods of making money with a blog may not be so obvious. You can use Google Adsense (the tiny text ads you see on many blogs) to make pennies a day, promote affiliate products that have a per-sale commission and make a few dollars a day, or create your own products and make tens or hundreds of dollars a day.

In all cases, having a blog with great free content — and being honest and picky about the products you choose to promote — will help convince others that you are trustworthy and that your recommendations can be taken seriously.

Two of the products that have been successful on my blog are ZipRealty and the Entertainment book. ZipRealty enables you to receive email updates on specific houses. Their search is also great; you can save a search like “foreclosures in these three cities with at least 3 bedrooms and 1500 square feet for less than $300,000″ and get email updates. It’s all point and click, and quite easy to use. I use it as a research tool and log in to their website at least once a week to view my saved searches.

For every person that signs up through ZipRealty on my website, I get $5. Since I use it, and know how useful it is, I have no problem recommending it.

I have a similar experience with the Entertainment book. My mom bought them when I was a kid; now I buy them for the American Airlines discount (5% off any fare, even the cheapest ones!) and the $5 of $50 coupons at Safeway. These two discounts alone pay for the purchase price of the book every year. Since I use it, I enthusiastically recommend it. Every time you buy an Entertainment book from this site, I get $4.

These small commissions add up. In my case, I don’t mention them much, but I still earn about $70-80/month from them. No small feat!

In my next post in this series, I’ll address how to become a successful blogger. Not setting up WordPress and a hosting account — that’s been covered ad infinitum on other blogs — but how to engage your audience and write more interesting posts, so you, too, can grow your blog readership and influence.

Feel free to leave your comments on why you do or don’t blog!

Recommended Reading:

• How I Turned My Mediocre Website Into a Million-Dollar Business. Website design isn’t as important as how you treat your customers.
• How Much Money Do Bloggers Make? on Problogger. Informal survey: Most make less than $500/month.
• ZipRealty. Sign up for an account and start tracking real estate prices in your area!
• The Entertainment book. Huge discounts at local restaurants and stores. Even if you only umse the grocery store coupons, it still pays for itself and saves you money. I buy one every year!

Typically, two major obstacles come up: time and money. I addressed time previously. Now I’d like to address how to start a business with no money.

First: Two Major Misconceptions

Let’s clear up a major misconception: It doesn’t take a lot of money to start a business — even a million-dollar one. I started my business just after quitting a job, with a few thousand dollars of severance pay from my job. The year after that, my parents gave me a $15,000 loan so I could expand my business. So I “started” my business with just over $20,000.

On the other hand, let’s clear up another common misconception: Businesses that are good ideas don’t necessarily blossom into multi-million dollar enterprises right away. In fact, in May 2003, nearly two years after I started my business, and 8 months after I received the $15,000 loan from my parents, my business made a whopping total of $461/month in revenue. I could have made more money by consulting!

But I wasn’t discouraged. I could see that our revenue graph was going straight up. My customers really liked me. I was making a difference in their lives by running a web hosting company whose owner actually cared about who they were and what sort of business they ran. I knew I was in the right place, in a growing market. So I stuck with it.

It took six long years for my hunch–that web hosting wasn’t dead–to be validated, but I stuck with it and achieved success.

How can you do the same thing (with no money)?

The Four Values that are the Core of my Success

1. I worked every single day on my business. I’ve learned a key lesson when it comes to setting priorities: The night before, decide what one thing you can do on your business the next ay that will make you feel proud and accomplished to have performed it. It doesn’t have to be a lengthy task. For instance, one of my goals is to write a new blog post every week. This doesn’t always happen, but when I write a blog post, I consider that an accomplishment. With every post, I am building my personal brand, my subscribers, and I am getting recognition from other hard-working bloggers who enjoy my post. That’s enough for me to continue blogging. I consider every day which activities I can do to give me this feeling of accomplishment, and then I do those things — and ignore email, Twitter, and TV until they’re done!
2. I set goals and hit them. You see my strong goal-setting mentality on this blog, as well. To engage goals for yourself, make your goals public. Also, the more specific your goals are, the better. Right now, my biggest financial goal is to have $1 million a year in passive income by the time I’m 30. Having that goal has helped me align myself with the resources I need to achieve it. Set specific and measurable goals, and set them publicly. Write a blog. Send your goals to your friends and ask them to kick your butt about them! Keep track of your progress. Figure out why you hit the milestones — or didn’t hit them. Just the act of writing down specific, time-based goals makes you much more likely to achieve them.
3. I ignored lures of “instant riches.” Running a business takes a strong commitment. That’s why many “how to start a business” books emphasize starting a business in a field you’re passionate about, instead of starting something just for the financial gains. I enjoyed web hosting and technology, but what I enjoyed most was seeing those revenue graphs go up and the feeling of pride I got when happy customers sent me a thank-you letter. No “get rich quick” scheme will give you that same feeling of deep satisfaction. Stop flipping from one business idea to the next. Pick one, settle down, and make it work…even if it takes years for you to be able to quit your day job.
4. I stopped listening to those who told me it couldn’t be done. Everyone has fears, and people enjoy bringing you down to their level. When I started my web hosting company, a friend was convinced I’d fail. Even years later, he denigrated my choice to run a web hosting business, asking me at one point: “What have you done? Pfft. You started a hosting company. Anyone can do that.” I dug a bit deeper, though, and found out the real reason he was downplaying my achievement: He had started a web hosting company around the same time as mine, and it had gone nowhere. He assumed, then, that since his hosting company was not successful, mine would never be. By acknowledging my success, he would have to acknowledge his own failure, and that was painful. (By the way, the story ends well: we are still friends today.) Who in your life is telling you you will fail? What fears of theirs are really hiding behind their words? Most importantly, why are you letting those other people dictate your success or failure?

Interestingly enough, when I outlined my plan for Inspiring Innovators to another friend of mine, he said words quite reminiscent of my friend who started the web hosting company that fizzled. I asked him why, and he admitted he had owned a content-driven membership site that had failed. “The customers didn’t stick around,” he said. I acknowledged to him that my business plan may change, but I’m also not listening to his predictions of failure for my business! I’m quite confident I will succeed, even if the game changes a bit along the way.

Notice, that among these traits (determination, persistence, specific and measurable goal-setting, and a willingness to challenge others’ beliefs), “money” is not mentioned. Neither is time. If you have the drive, the determination, and the willingness to succeed, you are much more likely to succeed – regardless of how much money you start out with.

How do you get started? That’s a forthcoming post. Please subscribe to see my ideas on how to get started creating a million-dollar business (or just a business that will earn you a little extra cash) from home. As always, I promise to be honest and blunt in my appraisals of many ways to “make money online.”

Recommended Reading:

• 20 Ways to Make $100 A Day Online. You CAN make money online without being a geek! This is a comprehensive, 247-page guide to making your first dollar online. I bought it and devoured it. It’s one of the best “getting started” guides I’ve ever read on Internet marketing. As an added bonus, it’s written by top Internet marketing experts, not scammers. Well worth the price.
• How To Make A Million Dollars. My earlier blog post emphasizes some of these same keys, as well as going into detail about negotiating and “multiple streams of income”.
• Three Business Ideas That Will Help You Thrive During a Recession. What if the upcoming recession is an opportunity for you to make more money than you are now — and be happier to boot? Specific details about what types of businesses you can start that will benefit from a recession.
• How To Make Money From Your Blog. Steve Pavlina details how he turned a $9 investment (in a domain name) into over $40,000 a month in revenue. (Hint: Not instantly!)

This is the blog post that you should send to anyone who is considering buying a house in the next 12-24 months. At the very least, it will arm you with excellent negotiating power.

Two Metrics That Show Whether ANY House is a Good Buy

Here are two facts that are well-known by a few savvy folks, but that most house buyers are unaware of. How do you tell if any house (no matter what the neighborhood or location) is a good buy? Just use these two rules of thumb:

1. Housing prices historically should be 3-5x median annual income. This one is easy to calculate. Look up the median household income for your area on city-data.com. Using their guide for 95118 (my zip code), and scrolling to the bottom of the page, we find that the estimated median household income in 2005 is $73,840. That means house prices for an average house should be in the range of $221,520 to $369,200. The lowest-priced single-family home in this zip code, however, is $489,900. That means prices still have far to drop!

   The great thing about the 3-5x median annual income marker is that it works for pretty much anywhere in the country. In more desirable areas, it’s more likely to be 5x annual income. In less desirable areas, you will be able to get more bang for the buck.

   For instance, in 47012, the zip code I grew up in (in Indiana), the median household income for 2005 is $43,174, and the lowest-priced single-family home on the MLS is just $14,500. (Yes, in Indiana, $14,500 buys you a house with land!) A comparable house to the $489,900 house here in 95118 sells for about $70,000 in Indiana — 1.62x median annual income there vs. 6.63x median annual income here. This shows how inflated prices are here in California — as well as in many urban areas around the country.

   Wait until you see many houses available in the 3-5x income range before buying.

2. Housing prices should be approximately 100x-150x monthly rent. This is another indicator to see if housing is overpriced in your area. Keep in mind that ideally, your monthly mortgage payment should be less than an equivalent rent payment, since mortgage payments don’t include taxes, insurance, and maintenance, and rent payments do.

   Let’s use a local example. I pointed out in 2003 that I felt the condo development where I lived at the time was overpriced. Now, recently, a condo in that development came on the market at a lower price than what I saw in 2003 — $329,900. This looks like a good deal when you consider that the same condo was selling for $342,500 in 2003, but let’s look at this through a different lens: rent prices. Here’s a nicer condo in the same development renting for $1600/month. That means you’re paying 206x rent to buy the condo (plus over $200/month as a homeowner’s association fee!)

   This means this condo, even at the “reduced” price, is still not a great deal. How low will prices go? Realistically, I think these condos will be back at 125-150x rent within a few years. That means this $329,900 condo will only be worth about $240,000. Don’t buy unless you’re under 200x rent, and even then, consider (using the other facts in this blog post) that the market may drop even more. An excellent rule of thumb is to never pay more in a 30-year fixed mortgage payment than you would in rent, since that’s a great example of a bad deal.

When Will Higher-Priced Houses Fall?

Here is an estimate of exactly when higher-priced houses will fall. It’s based on research I’ve done since 2006 and hours of reading and correlating past housing bubbles to this one.

1. We still haven’t seen the worst of the foreclosure crisis. Several people have commented or written to me asking when housing prices in more desirable neighborhoods such as Los Altos, Palo Alto, and Mountain View will fall. Those areas are still showing relative strength. Why are they showing strength? Simple: Foreclosures drive market prices, and there haven’t been as many foreclosures in those areas.

   Why fewer foreclosures? It’s not for the reasons many think — that people who buy in those areas have better cash cushions. It’s simply because prime loans have longer reset periods — and many of them haven’t reset yet. The reason we are hearing so much about “subprime” is because subprime loans reset sooner than prime loans.

   Take a look at this mortgage rate reset chart. It will allow you to “psychically” predict the news headlines for 2009. What will those headlines say? As you can see, subprime will continue to make headlines through 2009, but in 2009 and 2010, new headlines will appear: “Alt-A vulnerable too. Option ARMs resetting like mad.”

   Many people think “prime” loans are safe. They’re not — as evidenced by stories like this local couple who took out a $1M “prime” loan and who will now likely default. Even “prime” homeowners couldn’t do the math to realize that a $2800 payment on a $1 million loan doesn’t pay off all the principal. Welcome to the new reality of “prime” loans. We will be hearing many more stories like this next year as more Option ARMs reset.

2. Housing runs in 16-year cycles. It always amazes me when I hear people say, “The housing market is unpredictable.” Actually, unlike the day-to-day fluctuations of the stock market, the housing market is strongly predictable. Why? There are typical points in your life when you’re buying a house and typical points when you’re selling one. Since birth cycles are well-known, we can predict housing boom and bust cycles. It takes almost exactly 16 years for a housing cycle to complete a full turn. This has been true since the Great Depression.

   In 2006, I made a shockingly accurate timeline of this current bust based solely on a blog that posted newspaper clippings from the previous bust in the early 1990′s. You’ll see this in a lot of newspaper articles, too — you’ll be surprised at how many times you see “since 1991″ or “16 years ago” in an article referencing when the last time this happened was.

   By this methodology, the bottom should be in between late 2010 and 2013. But don’t expect housing prices to rise much if you buy then. But then again, you weren’t buying as an investment, were you?

This post gives you all of the tools you need to figure out when buying a house makes financial sense — no matter where you live. Keep in mind that no matter what housing prices look like, if you don’t plan to stay in that house for at least 5 and preferably 10 or more years, it’s not a good deal to buy. Just rent and invest instead. Even investing in bonds will likely bring you a better historical return than housing — 5-6% per year vs. 2-3% for housing.

In my opinion, it is always better to have liquid, easily-accessible cash (in mutual funds or high-yield savings accounts) than it is to have your money tied up in real estate. It’s much easier to click the “sell” button in your trading software and get a transfer to your bank account in a few days than it is to take weeks or months to sell your house. Keep yourself liquid, set up an automatic savings plan, and save for your retirement instead of expecting your house to make you rich. By following these simple steps, you will be well on your way to creating a wealthy future.