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This is How You Can Create a Home Michelle
and Kim took their hobby and turned it By Rocky Tapscott Redundant! Michelle sat stunned as her Supervisor delivered the second most devastating news she had ever heard in her life. Tears welled up in her eyes and fear filled her heart as she absorbed the fact that after Friday, she would no longer have an income to support her 10 year old daughter, Kim. Michelle had poured her heart and soul into her career these last 6 years and felt like she was really going places with the Company. She was the Accounting team leader, responsible for overseeing the work of 5 other employees. She had excelled in every task they had set for her and had been sure that this meeting with her boss was going to see her winning a raise in salary. Instead, she had been shown the door - 1 weeks notice and she was out of a job. True, she had missed several days work over the last few months, but her daughter had been diagnosed with a rare blood disease - that was the most devastating news she had ever heard - and she had been taking her to Doctors and Hospital appointments in an attempt to make her well again. Kim seemed to have recently turned the corner after many painful tests and treatments, and things were starting to look good for the two of them again. And now this. Michelle protested to her Supervisor, but the Companies decision was final - she was to leave the building for the last time on Friday. The next few days flew by and before she knew it, she was standing outside the front door of her beloved workplace, unemployed, lonely, confused and angry. What was she going to do now? She had saved a little money, but not much - she was always going to start a savings and investment program some-day, but as she was young, she had kept putting it off. Now she realized the serious mistake she had made. She was indeed in deep financial trouble. Pondering The Future Michelle walked to a nearby park to consider her future. She honestly had no idea of what she was going to do with the rest of her life. She hated her boss and now realized that the security she thought she had working for a big Company was merely an illusion. Just like so many other loyal, hard working employees before her, she had been chasing a dream - the dream of job security. In the Industrial age, this had been possible. Find a big Company, work hard for 40 years, and they looked after you when you retired. In the information age, that was a thing of the past. Michelle had read about this type of thing happening, but had never considered it would happen to her... It was all like a bad dream - but it was definitely real. She had no-one she could turn to for financial help - her parents were Pensioners, paying rent for a 1 bedroom flat, and with no assets to speak of. She had always been the one they had thought would make something of herself. The career woman, going places with the big salary and the important job title. She couldn't even bear to tell her Mum and Dad that she had been sacked, at least not just yet. They would only worry about her. As she sat on the park bench weighing her options, she thought about a dream she had long held to turn her love of horses into some sort of Business. Michelle needed a Money Tree But she didn't want it to just be like any old job. She had read Robert Allen's wonderful book 'Multiple Streams of Income', in which he describes what he calls 'Money Tree' Businesses. To qualify as a Money Tree Business, anything Michelle did had to pass through the 9 Money Tree filters - M - Stands for Multiple Streams of Income O - Stands for Outstanding Products or Services N - Stands for Nothing Down (or at least very little of her own money) E - Stands for Employee Resistant Y - Stands for Yield T - Stands for Trend and Timing R - Stands for Residual E - Stands for Everybody, Every Day E - Stands for Enthusiasm Michelle had read and re-read this book and knew the 'Money Tree Formula' well. She had planned to look at starting a Home Based Business around her beloved horses one day in the future, but now she felt that the universe might be giving her the opportunity to turn her dream into reality. She knew that wealthy people don't work for money, they work to build Businesses that produce streams of residual income. The poor and middle class work hard to buy doodads with after tax dollars - things of no real lasting value. The rich spend their residual income on investments and any doodads that they do buy - that is why they get richer while the poor and middle class get poorer. Just how she was going to build her Business, she wasn't sure, but she felt that getting fired was the sign she needed to try. She had seen an ad in the local paper that morning about turning a hobby into a Business using the power of the Internet. Up until that week, her career timetable would never have allowed anything that interfered with her job - she was simply too busy. But now... She walked quickly home and re-read the Newspaper ad. It gave a telephone number and a website address for people seeking further information. Rather than risk talking to some pushy salesperson on the phone, she logged on to the website and carefully read through the article describing what sounded like the perfect home based Business. She was excited. She momentarily forgot about her dire situation and felt a renewed sense of purpose. Her passion for horses was shared by her daughter and she had often thought about offering other aspiring horse riders a training course with personal instruction and mentoring as a sideline Business - one that Kim could operate with her when she was older if she chose to. She started to form in her mind a picture of her ultimate goal - it was not simply to create a job for herself and Kim, she could build income streams from several horse related Businesses selling products and services via the Internet, thus leaving her time to focus on her true passion, helping disabled children find happiness from riding horses as part of their therapy. Michelle knew that this was the one. Her intuition was screaming at her - this is it! She clicked onto the order page to see how much this golden opportunity was going to cost her. The ad had been placed by a Company that built high profile websites for major corporations, who were now trying to tap into different markets. The price for a basic website package with 2 days full time training on how to operate it was $5000! 5 Grand, with no guarantees... And that was just for starters. Every additional page would cost extra. Every change to an existing page would cost extra. Traffic and visitors to the site? That would cost extra. A Newsletter? That would cost extra. Submitting the pages to the Search Engines, extra. It was all too much. Her heart sank. She could not risk $5000 from her meager savings on something this risky, especially when the cost could blow out to double that. What if it didn't work? What if Kim got sick again? She felt even more desperate now. How was she going to get through this? But something inside her told her not to give up on this idea. To her credit, Michelle heeded the advice of her subconscious and continued researching the website idea. She decided to find a web hosting service and try to build a site of her own from scratch. She logged on to one of the major search engines and searched for 'web hosting services'. The search returned 37 Million results! 'Incredible', she thought. So much competition in this area. She read through some of the listings, but with so much information, she just started to get confused. Then she searched 'horse training services'. 721,000 results. 'Holy smoke', she thought. The odds against success seemed daunting. But most of the results were from all over the US and other parts of the world - nothing local. She narrowed her search down to 'horse training services Brisbane'. 15000 results. Still, the task seemed formidable, but this was something she really felt she wanted to do. And she noticed that hardly any of the search results actually mentioned Brisbane. Maybe there was something here after all. The thought of working for a Boss again didn't appeal to her at all after she had been so easily dumped by her previous employer. The more she thought about it, the more the internet seemed like the perfect solution to her problem. But how to best go about creating a site that worked, but didn't cost an arm and a leg? And Then, The Solution To Michelle's Problems... She searched various words relating to building a web Business for the next few days and one theme kept coming up - Solo Build It! She clicked on one of the links and arrived at a page that was about to change her life. She read through the information about this all-in-one site building, marketing and website promotion package, knew in her heart that it was what she had been looking for - her intuition was screaming again. She read the page over and over again until she was convinced that this was the one. Michelle got all the way to the order page and then got cold feet - she just couldn't take the plunge right then and there after so much disappointment. She decided to sleep on it. Michelle logged off the internet and went to bed that night tired and frustrated, but with a nagging thought that she might have found the solution. That night, she dreamt of horses, training camps for kids, financial freedom and Kim as head instructor of a thriving Business, run from home on 20 acres just outside the city. It was perfect - a wonderful picture - something to strive for she thought. The next morning, Michelle decided to do some comparison shopping to see what the competition was offering in complete website building packages. The more she looked, the better Solo Build It! (SBI!) scored. Always skeptical, she read through the Report that outlined the SBI! site building process again and again - a system that Sitesell owner and founder Ken Evoy calls C-T-P-M...once she was convinced, she decided to take the plunge. *Just in case you would like to read about Ken's C-T-P-M process, then this article will explain it...it shows you how the web really works, and why most website owners have got it all wrong.. And besides, Solo Build It! came with a money back guarantee. If it didn't work out, she got her money back - simple as that. A much better deal than the $5000, take-it-or-leave-it website that she had first considered. So it complied with the third Money Tree Businesses requirement - Nothing or very little money down. While it was going to cost her a few hundred dollars to get started, it was practically risk free, and cost much less than the website package she had originally looked at. Michelle knew that now was the time for action Michelle bought the package online and immediately downloaded the comprehensive Manual that came with the program as a PDF file. As recommended at the beginning of the Manual, she read it through entirely over the next couple of days to get the 'big picture' of what was involved in building her web Business. It was indeed fairly daunting at first - it was all new and she really didn't have a clue what she was doing. She decided that she would take it slowly through the 10 day site building process outlined in the manual and just see what happened. The first task was to decide on a theme. That was easy. Horse training. However, she followed the instructions and brainstormed three topics to see if something else grabbed her attention even more than horses. Kim got involved as well - she loved the thought of working with her mum on a new, exciting project. Nothing really compared with horses as their theme, so that was what Michelle and Kim decided to stick with. They wanted an online personal horse training Business that would eventually give them financial freedom. Michelle and Kim would build a Theme Based Content Site based on this topic. They would then find suitable Merchants who offered products compatible with their horse training theme for sale online, and become Affiliates of those Businesses as outlined in the Manual. This would allow them to make additional income from the sale of related products and services for which they would receive a commission - the first of the Money Tree Business requirements - Multiple Streams of Income. The next step in the process was to use the SBI manager software that came with the package to search the internet and brainstorm keywords that were relevant to her chosen topic. The manual showed her how to do this, so she set the computer off on it's quest and went off and had morning tea with Kim while it completed it task. The brainstorming sessions came back with hundreds of horse related keywords and topics and sorted them by supply, demand and profitability - how many websites contained those words, compared to how many people were searching for them, and then a ratio of the most to least profitable keywords. As you can see, although many of these words had lots of competition (lots of other sites mentioning them), there were some that looked like they would be very profitable, because not too many sites used them and lots of people were searching for them using search engines - the highest profitability keywords offer the best chance of top search engine rankings, therefore...
All looked like excellent topics. As the Manual instructed, these key words would become the file names of her keyword-focused-content-pages, along with obvious things like horse training, horse events and horse riding, etc. Michelle loved her horses, in fact anything to do with horses, with a passion All she had to do was write articles that offered great, free information containing these keywords and the search engines would find her pages when they were searched for by someone looking for that subject or topic. The search engine listing would encourage web searchers to her site where her valuable content would satisfy their need for information on their chosen search query. The article content would also promote her training services and related horse products to visitors and ask them to subscribe to her planned fortnightly newsletter, Horse Training Tips. Now, it was time to decide on a domain name - the name of her website. This had to be something classic, classy and instantly recognizable as a horse training website that delivered results. The girls studied the keywords that the brainstorming searches found and together decided on horsetrainingresults.com This seemed to fit the essence of what they were doing - providing a service that offered measurable results to horse owners looking to get the best out of their mounts. Michelle registered her Domain name (it was included in the SBI! price) and started writing her Home Page and the content pages of her site. From that day, they had a real, live web Business Kim helped by finding suitable pictures on the internet and organizing them for inclusion in the lessons and articles. She also wrote articles from a younger riders perspective. This gave a great balance to the content of the site - and it sure helped when two people with the same goal were working together as well. They had the beginnings of a mastermind group, as Napoleon Hill taught in his classic book, Think and Grow Rich. As they built each page, Michelle and Kim used the 'Analyze It' function to make adjustments to keywords and body copy so that the search engines would find her pages easily and rank them highly in their search results. The 'Analyze it' function checks every page before you build it to make sure it is optimised for the search engines that it will be listed with. Once they were happy with each page, they simply hit the 'Build It!' button, and the page was built and hand submitted to all of the major free search engines. It was that easy. The girls continued writing great content for the next three weeks (Kim could only help after school), finding affiliate programs that offered products they wanted to promote, joining up as a member (usually free) and then including links to those merchants sites in the body copy of her pages. About this time, Michelle realized that she would soon run out of money if she didn't do something to immediately bring in some cash. Reluctantly, she found a part time job with a local secretarial service and started working a few hours a day for local Businesses. But her dream was to work from home. She was confident that she could make a success of her Internet Business - she just needed to give it time. A few weeks rolled by, and Michelle and Kim now had 70 pages of good, solid content on their website. Michelle had downloaded the Alexa Toolbar as recommended in the Manual to track her traffic ranking, and noted that their site was already ranked at 541,254 out of 16.6 Million active websites - not bad for a beginner! She had read that by following the process laid out in the SBI! manual, she could build a high traffic website that would send her free visitors from the search engines 24 hours a day - this was indeed what was happening. Her 'Traffic Stats' page was showing her that her traffic was doubling every 30 days. She now had 350 unique visitors each day. Last month, she had 170. Wow, the C-T-P-M process worked! Finally...Payday! Then, one day, her first Affiliate Commission Cheque arrived - it was for the princely sum of $21.14. It wasn't much, but Michelle could see the 'Big Picture' - this was only the start of her Global Internet Business. She had actually earned money from a Business she started from scratch. She was creating wealth from an idea, some hard work, and a proven system. She was making money while she slept - Michelle and Kim had a Money Tree Business. She was so proud of what they had achieved. She was becoming an 'Infopreneur' - a person who sells information, and Kim was learning how to become one as well - at 10 years of age...what a wonderful start in life! And she was getting paid around the clock! This is the secret of the rich - they work during the day to set up multiple streams of income that flow into their lives while they sleep. They get wealthy while they sleep! The structure of Michelle and Kim's site was simple. They wrote a series of Free lessons showing people how to do various types of training with their horses. Then, within the content of each page, were links recommending an assortment of products and personal training services to anyone who wanted to go further. Michelle had her phone number listed in the articles and on the Contact Us page, so people could call and ask questions or make a booking. People soon started to call Michelle for advice and to book training sessions. Customers came from all over, because she was viewed as 'the' expert when it came to horse training - well she had a great website devoted to this topic, didn't she? The content was well researched and solid. The recommendations were all for top quality products and services and they came from the heart. She simply 'had' to know what she was doing. Towards Financial Freedom...doing what they loved to do! Pretty soon, Michelle was able to say goodbye to her part time work, as she was training and creating information products full time - eBooks, CD and DVD tutorial courses, How To Manuals. She loved it. And every Saturday she had set aside time for her ultimate goal - to brighten up the lives of disabled children by giving them time riding her two Palomino mares, Char and Smokey. The kids absolutely loved their time spent with the horses, and it looked like it really helped many of them with their therapy - and Michelle was passionate about giving them more time riding. Soon, she would be in a position to do that...soon. Affiliate sales over the next few months really started to escalate. First, $253 per month, then $1254, then $3141. Michelle's training services were booked solid. She was doing what she loved and getting paid handsomely for it. She was able to charge more than other trainers for her services because she was seen as an expert in her field - she had no real competition. The website gave her the credibility she needed to stand above all of her peers. Eventually, Michelle decided to start contracting out the training services - while she loved training people one on one, the time she spent doing this was much better spent on building her Business. She didn't want the hassle of employees (wages, insurance, compensation, lawsuits, etc) - because it wasn't part of the Money Tree Formula - if she had to physically be there to do the work, it wasn't a real Business, it was just a job. It had been great teaching students herself while she had been getting the Business started, but now she had a higher purpose - to spend a lot more time with the kids. She still kept a tight reign on her contractors, who all shared her passion for horses, and she made sure that they were giving the best possible service and coaching. Contracting out the horse training gave her more time to spend on the kids therapy lessons - she was in heaven. Ride the Trend - don't fight it The traffic to the website kept building - she was 'On Trend', another one of the Money Tree Formula requirements. Horses were big Business. People are addicted to them - they passionately want to know all they can about their addiction. This is the secret of making incredible profits online...find a market that you love that other people are also addicted to. Not anything like drugs of course - things like fishing, golf, quilting, weight loss, exercise...that sort of thing. The kind of market that has lots of devoted fans looking for information - then you simply ask them what they want and sell them that information. The money was flowing into Michelle's Business from multiple streams because she had set everything up right at the start. The more traffic her site attracted, the more money she made. Once Michelle started her Newsletter, (as outlined in the Manual) her affiliate sales exploded. She built a list of targeted subscribers who knew her and trusted her product recommendations. They bought stuff like crazy! Residual Income - Earn money like a Rock Star Many of the affiliate programs Michelle and Kim recommended to their visitors and subscribers offered products or services that had monthly or quarterly renewal fees - these income streams are residual - every time one of their visitors renewed their regular order, Michelle and Kim were paid again - month after month, like a Rock Star does with a recording on a CD. Do the work once, get paid over and over again. Now that can get exciting. Michelle then found a Multi Level Marketing (MLM) opportunity that she was able to tie in neatly with her horse products Business that gave her another growing stream of residual income. With a good balance of residual income sales such as the riding lessons taught by others, a float hire joint venture, feed supplies from the local produce store and her MLM Business, plus once only purchases (ebooks, training manuals, etc), Michelle and Kim's website should prove to be a great income earner into the future as long as they look after their customers and keep providing them with what they want. Plus, they are now developing joint ventures with other horse related websites and local merchants that will increase their revenues and profits massively. Competitors come and go, but Michelle and Kim's income just keeps increasing because their website continues to receive lots of Free traffic from the search engines. They also spend a small amount of money targeting profitable key-words at the major Pay Per Click search engines (again, this is explained in the manual) They promote their Business off-line in various Niche Magazines and Newspapers as well, and Michelle submits her articles to other Horse related newsletters for publication (which brings in more visitors) but the bulk of their traffic and revenue still comes from those free search engine placements - because that's what the SBI! process of C-T-P-M helped them set up. Their Business fits most of the Money Tree Criteria - it's the Business model for the new millennium - build multiple streams of income doing something you love and are passionate about. Get free traffic from the search engines and you are in Business. You can do the same thing yourself - build an Internet Business that has the potential to free you from working for a boss forever. You can build multiple streams of income right from your own dining room. If you would like to read the article that changed Michelle and Kim's life, Click Here. So now It's Your Turn I hope this story has given you an insight into how you can live your dream - to work for yourself from home without the need for a JOB (Just Over Broke). Building an Internet Business is not a get-rich-quick scheme - like anything worthwhile, it will require work and commitment on your part...but the rewards are worth it. And I'd like to leave you with a couple of questions to get you thinking...
Then now is the time...re-read the article that Michelle read and then just do it! as the Nike ad says. If this article has got you thinking, and you would like some more ideas on how you can use the Internet to promote your Business or even expand into new areas, then...here's what to do next. Rocky Tapscott has developed a “30 Minute Website
Strategy And Marketing Tune-Up” which he conducts over the telephone
or via Skype. Here is what we accomplish together in this fast-paced, zero-nonsense session: • Traffic Generation Strategies: Lying awake at night worried about getting more people to your website ? You are not alone... Rocky has helped hundreds of clients clear this hurdle with advice and strategies that can save you money and boost your long term returns. You're guaranteed to get several ideas that you can use immediately to take your business forward. • Increasing Website Conversions: It's
one thing to have people coming to your website. It's another to make them leave
their cash with you as they pass through. We'll look at specific strategies you
can use in your business to suck more money out of your website visitors day in
day out... Please be assured that this consultation will not be a thinly disguised sales presentation; it will consist of the best intelligence
Rocky can give you in a thirty minute time span. There is no charge for this call,
however the call must be strictly limited to 30 minutes. You will also be provided with a pre-consultation questionnaire that will prepare both you and Rocky to get maximum value in the shortest amount of time. I'm looking forward to speaking with you shortly, Warmly,
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