How to Overcome the Rising Cost of Living
There are three ways to afford your existing quality of life (or improve it) in today's depressingly fast rising costs:
Only the last four are practical (though some people may find option 7 possible).
Of course, getting a pay rise (8) is possible, for some, but the value of that pay rise will decrease as prices continue to rise.
If you want to buy and sell products (9) you initially have to buy the products.
Okay if you can afford to.
What about storage costs, advertising, packaging? So, what do I mean by option 10 - Sell products (without buying them)? How can you sell products you don't have? Well, there are companies that will deliver direct to your customers.
They are called drop shippers.
What happens is that you advertise their products (word-of-mouth may be effective if you have a large circle of friends and colleagues, in which case you wouldn't have to pay out for advertising).
Your customers pay you and you pay the drop shippers who then deliver the goods to your customer.
Sounds great, and it can work well, if you can find a good, reliable drop shipper and have a good source of customers.
How do you sell information (11)? Have you seen how many "How To...
", "Dummies Guide to..
..
", "Teach Yourself...
" and other self-improvement books written by experts there are in bookshops? If you are looking to improve your golf swing or grow perfect roses, for example, you can browse round all the bookshops in town or look on Amazon for relevant self-help books.
Browsing round bookshops can take forever, and then you may not find what you are looking for.
The same could go for Amazon, but when you find something you have to wait for it to be delivered - an annoying inconvenience in today's fast-paced world.
But there are astute authors out there who realise that people want things now, authors who don't want to spend a fortune committing their expertise to "paper" only to find that they can't get it published, or they have to pay to get a trial run.
What these people do is create an electronic book or e-book - like a Word document.
This is then converted to a PDF document (which formats it like a book and allows it to be protected so that it can't be changed).
They might then advertise it on Google, Yahoo or MSN, or write an article about it on an Ezine (like this one).
When someone orders the e-book, the author can either send it as an attachment to an email, or provide a link to it so that the customer can download it to his or her PC.
You can certainly make money online in this way.
If you have a specialist skill or knowledge - and it can be on any subject you like, from how to select a good second hand car to perfecting your golf swing.
Once you have sold a few (or if you can't seem to get any takers), you can get other people to sell it for you.
You pay a percentage of each sale to the seller, so you make money (much more than you would through your own efforts) and they make money.
These people who sell your information product for a commission are called affiliates.
If you don't have a specialist skill or knowledge or couldn't/don't want to write an e-book, you can just become an affiliate marketer.
As an affiliate marketer you can earn $20 or more per sale.
With a well written and popular e-book and some effective advertising (there are e-books that will explain how to do that!) you could sell several hundred with a single campaign.
But there is nothing to say you have to stick with one product, or one campaign.
Just think about it - the earning potential is huge.
There are hundreds of affiliate marketers making 5 figure sums every MONTH.
You don't need any special skills; you don't even need any money (as long as you already have a computer and internet access).
So what are the benefits of affiliate marketing? For a start, once you get the hang of it there is very little effort required.
Also:
- Make more money
- Make more money
- Make more money
- Beg
- Steal
- Gamble
- Sell your unwanted or unused stuff on eBay or at a boot/garage sale
- Move to a country where the cost of living is lower
- Bump off your rich relations for their inheritance
- Marry a millionaire
- Get a pay rise or get a new job which pays more
- Buy and sell products
- Sell products (without buying them)
- Sell information
Only the last four are practical (though some people may find option 7 possible).
Of course, getting a pay rise (8) is possible, for some, but the value of that pay rise will decrease as prices continue to rise.
If you want to buy and sell products (9) you initially have to buy the products.
Okay if you can afford to.
What about storage costs, advertising, packaging? So, what do I mean by option 10 - Sell products (without buying them)? How can you sell products you don't have? Well, there are companies that will deliver direct to your customers.
They are called drop shippers.
What happens is that you advertise their products (word-of-mouth may be effective if you have a large circle of friends and colleagues, in which case you wouldn't have to pay out for advertising).
Your customers pay you and you pay the drop shippers who then deliver the goods to your customer.
Sounds great, and it can work well, if you can find a good, reliable drop shipper and have a good source of customers.
How do you sell information (11)? Have you seen how many "How To...
", "Dummies Guide to..
..
", "Teach Yourself...
" and other self-improvement books written by experts there are in bookshops? If you are looking to improve your golf swing or grow perfect roses, for example, you can browse round all the bookshops in town or look on Amazon for relevant self-help books.
Browsing round bookshops can take forever, and then you may not find what you are looking for.
The same could go for Amazon, but when you find something you have to wait for it to be delivered - an annoying inconvenience in today's fast-paced world.
But there are astute authors out there who realise that people want things now, authors who don't want to spend a fortune committing their expertise to "paper" only to find that they can't get it published, or they have to pay to get a trial run.
What these people do is create an electronic book or e-book - like a Word document.
This is then converted to a PDF document (which formats it like a book and allows it to be protected so that it can't be changed).
They might then advertise it on Google, Yahoo or MSN, or write an article about it on an Ezine (like this one).
When someone orders the e-book, the author can either send it as an attachment to an email, or provide a link to it so that the customer can download it to his or her PC.
You can certainly make money online in this way.
If you have a specialist skill or knowledge - and it can be on any subject you like, from how to select a good second hand car to perfecting your golf swing.
Once you have sold a few (or if you can't seem to get any takers), you can get other people to sell it for you.
You pay a percentage of each sale to the seller, so you make money (much more than you would through your own efforts) and they make money.
These people who sell your information product for a commission are called affiliates.
If you don't have a specialist skill or knowledge or couldn't/don't want to write an e-book, you can just become an affiliate marketer.
As an affiliate marketer you can earn $20 or more per sale.
With a well written and popular e-book and some effective advertising (there are e-books that will explain how to do that!) you could sell several hundred with a single campaign.
But there is nothing to say you have to stick with one product, or one campaign.
Just think about it - the earning potential is huge.
There are hundreds of affiliate marketers making 5 figure sums every MONTH.
You don't need any special skills; you don't even need any money (as long as you already have a computer and internet access).
So what are the benefits of affiliate marketing? For a start, once you get the hang of it there is very little effort required.
Also:
- You can work from home
- You can work from anywhere in fact; anywhere you can connect to the internet (although some of the preparatory work can be done offline)
- You don't need to employ any staff
- You don't have a boss to answer to
- You can earn as little or as much as you want
- You can earn money even when you are not working
- There's no stock to buy, no storage required, no packing & postage costs, no invoicing, no sales tax to account for
- You can start with as little as $100-200 (most businesses will cost 10 times that or more)
- There is no risk (apart from the $100-200 you spend starting up), although you should make that back even if you are the world's worst affiliate marketer
- No educational requirements (you obviously need to read & write)
