You can make money online by…

1. Selling and shipping products while someone else does all the work.
   In the Internet world, this is known as drop shipping. And it’s a great
   way to sell physical products without having to stock, ship, or fulfill
   orders. Instead, you hire a drop-shipping company to do that for you,
   so you can concentrate on marketing your website.

   The
   downside is that you have to pay a percentage of your profits to the
   drop-shipping company. But if you have your heart set on selling a
   physical product, or don’t have the time or money to develop your own,
   this is a good option.

2. Recommending products.
   When you become an affiliate for someone else’s company, you can start
   earning commissions very quickly just for referring visitors to their
   website. Again, there’s no need to stock products or fulfill orders.

   You will have to be prepared to do some pretty hefty promoting if you
   want to create a money-making business primarily as an affiliate. But
   it’s definitely the fastest way to start earning an Internet income.

3. Getting the right to sell other people’s products. A third way to make money online in record time without developing your
   own product is to buy the reprint or resell rights to someone else’s product.
   When you purchase the rights to an established product, you get (depending on
   the kind of rights you purchase) permission to sell someone else’s product for
   them and keep a percentage of the sale. Or the right to buy someone’s product
   outright and resell it, keeping the entire proceeds of the sale. And in the best-case
   scenario, you can even purchase the right to sell the purchasing rights to other
   people!

   You can find out how to get the rights for products like eBooks by
   approaching authors directly, or using a search engine to find out
   which rights would be best for you. This can be a very profitable way
   to make money online, but it does require an up-front investment.

These are all great ways to start your own money-making business
on the Net… and you can even mix and match them to create an even
bigger Internet income. Just keep in mind there are other Internet
profit models that will allow you to keep even more of your profits if
you’re willing to put in the time and effort.

Try out BeBiz – our easy website builder that guides you through each step of building a profitable website.

On Monday morning, hurricane Gustav blasted across Louisiana and surrounding states, leaving behind a trail of destruction estimated to be in the billions of dollars

But despite the extensive damage, the one thing people feared MOST never happened…

New Orleans was spared.

Gustav made landfall 100 miles to the south, and the city avoided a repeat of the devastation that Katrina brought three years ago.

But it’s not like the city wasn’t ready for the worst!

In the days leading up to Gustav’s arrival, over a million people were evacuated, and massive emergency shelters were set up in surrounding areas.

Drawing on everything they learned from Katrina, New Orleans planned for the worst… hoped for the best… and were rewarded with the best possible outcome.

Now, without minimizing in any way the human and financial costs of Gustav, it’s a lesson we can ALL take away for our own businesses.

Plan for the worst. Hope for the best.

You’re probably already planning for success, right? We all spend a LOT of time projecting our future sales and revenue, figuring out how to improve our business processes, and generally making sure we continue to profit.

And obviously, that’s good! Hoping for the best is what makes us successful as entrepreneurs.

But how much time do you spend preparing for unexpected surprises?

Do you have a plan in place for things that could go wrong? When the market you’ve been successfully selling to suddenly dries up? Or there’s another major change in the search engines and your traffic DIES?

Here are FIVE things you can do to make sure YOUR business is prepared for the worst… and sails through nearly any crisis:

1. Pursue Multiple Markets Using Small Niche Websites

Say you own a website, and with it, you’ve pretty much cornered the market for your single product. Sales are excellent, and the money is rolling in day and night, without you barely needing to lift a finger.

You’re in the perfect position, right?

Well, assuming that nothing EVER changes, then yes, you’ll be fine…

… but what if there’s a sudden shift in the market, and the product you’re selling, which was HOT just a few months ago, is suddenly something you can barely GIVE away? (Think it can’t happen? Just ask anyone who sells large SUVs for a living!)

So how do you prepare for the worst?

I always tell people that the BEST way to protect yourself against fickle markets is to have MULTIPLE small niche sites up and running.

Get one started, and once it’s converting, use everything you learned from that process to start another. And another.

Before you know it, you’ll have multiple sources of income, so if one of your products goes out of fashion, or falls out of favor, you won’t take a BIG hit to your revenue.

But remember: slow and steady wins the race. Don’t try to put together five different websites for five different niches all at the same time.

Work on one, get it converting, put it on "auto pilot," and then move on to site number two.

2. Target Multiple Markets Within Your Niche, Using Custom Landing Pages

Just as it’s a good idea to have multiple niche websites in place, it’s ALSO a good idea to make sure each individual website is targeting many different keyphrases using custom landing pages.

Don’t just create a single landing page for your best keyphrase, then call it a day!

You may get good traffic initially, but some day, that particular keyword or phrase is no longer going to be popular, or competitors will move in and start targeting that same keyword… and your sales will be LOST.

But if you do your research, and understand ALL of the main keyphrases your visitors are using to find you, you can create custom landing pages for each of the main phrases.

That way, if one of the keyphrases stops being productive, you’re still getting plenty of traffic to the other pages.

So to prepare for the worst, stay on top of your keywords — they often change over time — and make sure you’re always targeting as many as possible.

3. Make Sure Your Traffic Is Coming To Your Site From Many Different Sources

Are you getting most of your traffic (and sales) thanks to one or two #1 rankings on the search engines?

There’s NOTHING like free traffic from the search engines, right?

But have you considered what would happen if Google (or one of the other big search engines) suddenly decided to make significant changes to their algorithms (the formulas they use to rank websites), and, without warning, you found yourself on page 37 in the search results?

It would literally be the END of your traffic!

And if you think that will never happen, it already has! Not that long ago, Google made some significant changes to the way they rank sites, and there were a LOT of websites that literally fell off the radar!

So if you’re depending solely on the search engines to drive an endless stream of traffic to your doorstep, right NOW is the time to diversify.

Of course, you can always turn to pay-per-click advertising if there’s a sudden change in your free traffic, but that can be costly, and to be honest, you won’t get as many visitors with a paid listing as you would from a top ranking in the natural search rankings.

So make sure you’re always thinking about other ways to drive FREE traffic (both online AND offline).

Submit your site to as many relevant web directories as you can… participate in online forums (and make sure there’s a link back to your site in your signature line)… give away LOTS of free content (again, with links back to your site)… issue press releases… and so on.

What’s really cool about all of these strategies is that, not only will they help you get traffic from other sources, they’ll actually help you in the natural search rankings, too, so now you have TWO good reasons to do it!

4. Actively Recruit Multiple Affiliates

Got a super-keen affiliate who is responsible for a BIG chunk of your sales?

That’s great, but what happens if that affiliate decides to retire, or try her hand promoting someone else’s product.

You could see your sales dry up literally overnight, and it can often take a LONG time to find another affiliate with the necessary skills (and customers) to replace the lost income.

Don’t wait until you NEED another good affiliate to find one!

Instead, start recruiting a stable of affiliates, so you’ll always have a few solid earners, no matter WHAT happens.

And while it can be tempting to open your affiliate program to anyone who’s interested, you may find that you’ll have more success hand-picking specific candidates.

That’s because a wide-open affiliate program can often draw a LOT of people who don’t really have experience selling online.

So to make sure you always have TOP affiliates working for you, start with a web search of sites that cater to your target market.

Focus on the sites that appear right at the top (or near the top) of the results. These are the savvy marketers, and chances are, they’ll have what it takes to sell for YOU, too.

From there, it’s just a matter of contacting them personally to discuss the possibility of promoting your product.

5. Find Multiple Suppliers For Your Product

What would you do if you discovered one day that the drop shipper or wholesaler who supplied you with your top-selling product could no longer get it? Or they’d gone out of business altogether?

If you haven’t been planning for the worst, chances are you’ll sit there in disbelief, as your revenue drops to zero within DAYS!

But if you had been preparing for the worst, you’d be fine…

… because you’d have backup suppliers for these same (or similar) products. so that the transition from your old to new supplier would be seamless.

Your customers will never know the difference, and your revenue will continue to flow uninterrupted.

Hoping for the best AND preparing for the worst is actually something POSITIVE you can do for yourself and your business. It’s the BEST way to prevent surprises, stay calm when potential disasters hit, and react to income-threatening situations quickly!

To your success,

Derek Gehl