Resources

These are resources and tools that I use along the way and feel were useful to myself or others.  Check back here later on as I will be adding more as I go.

Funding Your Business

  1. Sell stuff you already own but no longer want / need on the following sites:  www.eBay.com, www.Amazon.com
  2. Picking (buy things on discount, from thrift stores, auctions, flea markets, etc. and sell them on online market places for a profit.)
  3. Donating Plasma
  4. Participate in Medical Studies
  5. Please shoot me a message if you have more ideas for creating your own funding for your business.

 

Reading Resources (Books, Magazines, and Blogs)

 

Books

  1. The 4 Hour Work Week – by Tim Ferris – Great mental primer to show you what is possible.  Tim really focused on maximizing is output for his input.  In other words he obsessed over efficiency and claims to have gotten his general workload down to an average of four hours a week.  Although some people get hung up on the exact number four, this is not the point of the book.  The book explores improving efficiency in many different areas of business and entrepreneurship that people often get bogged down in.  Tim not only explains how he did it but uses examples from other peoples lives as well.  Great mental primer to show you what is possible and get you thinking in the right direction.
  2. Personal MBA – A fantastic overview of many business principles.  The book is organized topically so you can skip around.  There is no need to read it chronologically.  You can pick and chose chapters to read by what would be most immediately relevant to you.  The author also breaks down business concepts into layman’s terms and always provides examples that are easy to understand with out dumbing it down.  He uses examples from business history as well as his own career in business and also refers you to further resources for each chapter in the event that you would like to research deeper into a certain topic.  Great overview of business skills and gives you further resources to get into the weeds in detail if you so desire.
  3. Freedom Business by Collin Wright – I like Collins books, every one I read has taught me something and opened my mind up to new ideas and possibilities.  They are definitely worth more than the dollar or two that he charges for them.  Freedom Businesses is all about adapting and creating a business to fit your desired lifestyle.  Collin defined his ideal lifestyle as mobile.  He wanted to be able to travel and see the world and still generate an income that was significant enough that he could live comfortably.  He did this by adopting a more minimalist lifestyle and figuring out how to utilize his talents and skill-sets from his computer in other countries while he explores the world.  Very cool!  His book was one of the first I read and it really resonated with me.
  4. How To Make Money Online by Mike Omar:  Here is his website as well http://makemoneyfromhomelionsclub.com/  In his book, Mike does a great job of laying out his strategy for making ten websites which I would classify as niche websites based off his description of their target traffic numbers and competition levels.  The aim is for each website to have around 10 posts totaling at least 500 dollars per website monthly or an average of 50 dollars per post monthly.  He walks you through the process from keyword research to building your blog and monetizing and then link building in a white hat manner.  Good little book that really lays out the nuts and bolts of a method to get you started generating and online income.  He also has accompanying demonstration videos on his blog that you can check out for free.  Also this book is in the Amazon lending library so you can check it out for free as an Amazon Prime member.

 

Blogs and Websites

  1. SmartPassiveIncome.com – Pat Flynn’s blog.  Who is Pat Flynn?  He is a former architect who was laid off a few years ago and was forced to crush it with his online income streams.  He shares a ton of valuable information about his journey and is very transparent about the entire process.  He even posts a breakdown of his monthly income on his site.  This is awesome for demonstrating what is possible and he shares tons of tips and strategies he has learned along the way.
  2. http://source-wave.com/ – Alex Becker’s blog on Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Alex has some very impressive strategies (impressive because of the results he has obtained with them) for ranking even competitive keywords within a few days to a week.  He also understands the Google updates well and has solutions for dealing with them.
  3. www.entrepreneuronfire.com
  4. www.viperchill.com
  5. www.problogger.com & www.problogger.net
  6. http://www.freshdrop.com – Good place to pick up expired domain auctioned websites.  Try this for purchasing an older website that already has an established PR (Page Rank) of 2 or more (depending on your needs and how much money you can invest) and then utilizing the established PR for passing on link juice to a target website or for reworking the purchased domain into something of your chosing.
  7. www.flippa.com – Online marketplace for websites.  You can either sell or buy a website here.
  8. adsenseflippers.com – Two guys with a niche website model that focuses on creating a large amount of adsense niche websites and they build them to an acceptible earning level and then flip and sell them either on Flippa or on their own marketplace.  They also have a nice podcast and blog explaining their techniques and interviewing others to get pick their brains as well.  These guys have a good business sense so it’s interesting hearing their perspectives.

Keyword Research

  1. http://www.google.com/webmasters/ – Google provides a ton of free resources and education for learning how to utilize Google to ensure that your website gets discovered.
  2. http://www.semrush.com/ – SEM Rush is a great tool to get information on your competitors website.  With it you can find out what keywords they are ranking for as well as other data making it very useful for SEO research.
  3. http://moz.com/ – Formerly SEOmoz is now Moz.  It is a newer analytical feature that many would agree is an effective replacement for Google’s “Page Rank” (PR) helping you to quickly gauge what kind of quality a website has in the eyes of the search engines.
  4. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ – Open site explorer is a great tool for getting accurate data pertaining to a competitors links.  Knowing how many incoming and outgoing links as well as what quality those links are is vital information when doing your research on the competition.

Software

  1. Market Samurai –
  2. Google Keyword Planner (Formerly the Google Adwords Tool) – Free keyword research tool that many of the paid tools utilize for their base data.  Honestly, Google Keyword Planner Tool has everything you need to do keyword research however the paid tools really save you some serious time in this process and make it easier and more enjoyable.  Still, when you starting out I would learn the ins and outs of Google Keyword Planner first since it’s free and since it’s important for you to learn how the other tools gather their data.
  3. LongTail Pro & LongTail Platinum: Keyword research tool that has a very useful competition metric (Platinum Version) that really cuts down the time it normally takes to evaluate potential keyword competition.

People