Global Public Articles

If you are a service provider charging by the hour for your services, you may be trapped in a cycle of under-earning. Charging an hourly or even monthly rate for your time puts a ceiling on the amount of income you can earn.

Your profits are limited to how much time you have available to actively work with your clients. And that time is restricted because of all the other activities you are doing to run your business: marketing, sales calls, speaking, networking, writing a newsletter. . . the list goes on.

Can you relate?

The secret to breaking the “billable hours” ceiling is to come up with ideas and strategies to create passive income. Most financially successful professionals earning six and seven-figure incomes have products that earn them income while they sleep.

The shift to make is from the role of being just a service provider to being an information provider. You can still deliver your services, but you won’t have to wear yourself out always trying to find new clients because you’ll have passive sources of income that will cover your basic expenses and more.

Creating a line of information products has many benefits. In addition to earning you more money, it can:

- Position you as a credible expert
- Increase your visibility
- Expand your creativity and creative thinking
- Make you the go-to person in your topic area
- Establish a brand name for your professional identity
- Make your marketing more effortless

Some easy ways to get started building passive income include:

1. Printing a workbook that you can sell to participants at your seminars.

2. Creating an audio CD you can sell at the back of the room when you give a talk.

3. Writing an ebook based on one of your talks or workshops and selling it online along with bonus worksheets, checklists or audio.

4. Recording a teleseminar or series of teleseminars and selling access to the audio files at your website.

5. Creating an e-course you can charge a small fee for. This series of lessons delivered by autoresponder can also serve to generate leads for your business.

6. Licensing your workshops and programs that have a proven track record for others to deliver.

7. Getting referral fees for referring business to others.

8. Earning affiliate income by promoting other people’s products that offer you a percentage of sales if your clients buy.

The ideas for creating passive income are endless.

The benefit of creating information products in your business is that it will position you as the leading expert in your field and make you more money with less effort. Clients will call you instead of you having to chase after them. With information products, you can build an extremely profitable business that makes a real impact in the world.

Stop trading your time for money and start creating your first product or other passive income stream. You’ll be on your way to breaking the billable hours ceiling and increasing your financial success!

Jan Marie Dore publishes the newsletter and blog, Success Secrets for Professional Women. She teaches solo professional women marketing and sales strategies to attract new clients, grow their business, and make more money in less time. Sign up now at http://www.femalepreneurs.com/ezine

Many small business owners feel overwhelmed when they face the daunting prospect of getting their online presence going. Everywhere you turn there’s an “expert” trying to tell you what you ought to do.

As a coach and consultant to entrepreneurs, I’ve watched too many of you go astray, so I’ve assembled my Top Ten List of Mistakes so you can avoid them!

1. Not Having A Website - Over 77% of all Americans are online. Your clients and contacts expect you to have a web presence. You’ve got to be there. At this point, you are conspicuous by your absence.

2. Spending Too Much Money On A Too Fancy Website - Most small businesses will continue to make money the same way they always have—they don’t plan to change their business model to focus on Internet sales.

Service practitioners may be able to attract prospects by their website, but they’ll still need to have a more personal contact to close the deal. And so you need a GOOD enough website at a moderate cost. Don’t go overboard.

3. Not Posting Your Phone Number - If someone is interested enough in your website to want to call you and you don’t post your phone number prominently (on every page if possible!), you will lose that contact opportunity.

4. Putting Up Your Website Up And Walking Away - This is not a one time thing. You’ve got to keep it up to date. Don’t use an expensive graphic designer you’ll be reluctant to call because he’s too expensive.

And don’t barter your site with a relative or friend: they won’t want to hear from you. Empower yourself by using a content management system to create your own simple site and you can update it yourself whenever you want.

5. Thinking A Blog Will Do The Same Thing As A Website - Blogs are online journals and require frequent care & feeding. If your clients want to check out your business, they need the standard kind of information traditionally contained on a website.

6. Not Using Professional Email At Your Domain - Once you have registered your URL, your address in cyberspace, then you must use email at that domain.

No more AOL, Yahoo or even your ISP. You can use the email address even before the website is built.

7. Not Using A Signature File With Your Email To Make It Easy To Contact You - Emails ARE Internet marketing. You should always include your full contact information block at the bottom of every email communication so its easy to reach out to you!

Include your full name, email address, phone number and URL. A slogan and logo are frosting on the cake.

8. Not Tracking Traffic - How will you know what your website is doing for you if you don’t measure and monitor usage? You can set up Google Analytics for free. Then remember to check it regularly and understand your site activity.

9. Not Optimizing For Search - If you built a website it is because you want people to find you, so make sure the site can be found on the Internet. You shouldn’t have to pay for a search program if your site has deep and accurate keywords, lots of links and updated content.

10. Confusing Internet With Sales And Marketing - Too many entrepreneurs think spending all their time building their Facebook or Linked In profile or writing a weekly ezine is all they need to do to create a viable business.

Internet marketing should be one of many paths you pursue as you build your business, don’t let the fun of playing online fool you into thinking all you need to do is sit back and watch the money roll in! You’ve still got to have a sound sales and marketing plan and work it every day!

Deborah Gallant is an internet marketing trainer, author and business coach in Thousand Oaks, California.

Her company provides affordable website design & development tools for service professionals. Visit their website (http://www.WebPowerTools.com) for a free 30-day trial and a free copy of “Five Steps to Finally Getting Started with Internet Marketing”.

Jan Marie Dore publishes the newsletter and blog “Success Secrets for Professional Women”. She teaches solo professional women marketing and sales strategies to attract new clients, grow their business, and make more money in less time. sign up now at my website which is at http://www.femalepreneurs.com/ezine

Jan Marie Dore publishes the newsletter and blog “Success Secrets for Professional Women”. She teaches solo professional women marketing and sales strategies to attract new clients, grow their business, and make more money in less time. sign up now at my website which is at http://www.femalepreneurs.com/ezine

Small or startup businesses are at a maximum risk during a period of credit crunch or recession. This is mostly attributed to some factors, which are simply out of their control. The cash flow is important for any business, whether big or small. Startup businesses do not have huge capital in hand or any assets that they could use. Starting anew, their credit scores are also low. In this situation they are highly vulnerable to be badly affected during the credit crunch or recession. At this juncture, factoring can help startups to survive even in this critical situation of recession. It is the availability of the working capital that makes it easier for them to survive these tough times.

Small business owners generally find themselves in a very tricky situation. They may have had some sales and raised invoices on customers. However, because of the terms of business, they may receive payments only after a period of 60 days or in some cases even after 90 days. But presently, they have to make payments for other expenses like rent, taxes etc. Though their sales money is enough to take care of these expenses, they are not received immediately in hand. So, what would startups do in such a situation? They have to do their payments, but do not have funds in hand.

In such a case, they may generally approach a bank for a loan. But, having just started their business, the banks are seldom prepared to offer loans. So, to take care of their funding needs the startups can make use of what they have in their hands, namely the credit invoices. They may sell these invoices to the factoring companies, who in turn will provide them with immediate cash. They would generally charge a small percentage as processing fee and pay the balance amount to you.

Factoring of invoices involves a search for a factoring company, which is prepared to purchase your invoices. For the factoring company the creditworthiness of your customer is more important, and based on this they will offer you even up to 85 to 90% of the value of the invoice amount. After collecting the entire amount on the due date, they would pay you the balance amount after deducting the factoring fees. This procedure does not take more than 48 hours and you would have funds immediately to take care of your expenses. The process to procure a loan would normally take a lot of time like 4 weeks or so and would require high credit scores.

While factoring companies are not worried about your credit scores, they definitely would consider your customers’ credit scores. The factoring companies can help you find credit worthy customers to rule out bad debts. So, by factoring you even eliminate the bad debts from your financial statements. You can bring in greater discipline in your finances and some factoring companies even guide you to do so. You can easily plan out the sale of your invoices depending on the needs of funds. If you need funds urgently for any new project, you can factor your invoices and funds would be wired to your account in a matter of 48 hours.

Factoring of invoices helps you to manage your fund flow better and ensures that you do not lose any business because of lack of funds. You can also get the benefits of trade discounts with timely payments. For startups, the factoring company services can prove to be worthy tools to survive recession.

Kris Koonar is President of Crack Marketing leading a team of Internet Marketing Consultants with over 5 years of experience and 100’s of projects. Kris can be contacted at 1.877.270.7170 or kris@crackmarketing.com