Bill McRea

Freelancing is one of the quickest ways to start making money online. If you have a particular skill that is marketable and in demand, you can start making money by consulting with other businesses on a freelance basis. You can become a freelancer using many skills including photography, graphic design, programming, writing, web design and more. Another proven way to make money online that is inexpensive to get started with is Affiliate Marketing. Let’s compare and contrast these two money making methods and see which one might work for you.

Freelancing

To get started as a freelancer, all you really need is to be proficient enough at your chosen skill that clients will want you to work for them, and you need a website to market your services. When you set up your website you’ll want to include a portfolio of samples of work that you have done for other clients along with testimonials from satisfied clients.

One of the benefits of freelancing is that you get to choose the clients that you want to work with. You choose your projects, you do them and then you get paid right away.

One of the down sides of freelancing is that you are basically trading dollars for hours. You are only making money when you are doing the work. You complete the work, deliver it and get paid once for it. Then you must find more clients to work for.

Freelancing is appealing because you can do it from anywhere you have an Internet connection, and it’s flexible enough to fit in with the busy lifestyle of people who work from home.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers make money by referring buyers to product vendors. They generate traffic and build relationships with prospective buyers and then pre-sell them on the merits of a particular product. If the visitor clicks on a special affiliate link and purchases the product, the affiliate marketer earns a commission that represents a percentage of the product’s sales price.

Affiliate marketing takes time to set up a blog or a website and to start generating traffic. You can focus on using free methods to generate traffic that take time, or spend money to purchase PPC (pay per click) traffic that kicks in right away.

With affiliate marketing once you get your sites set up and generating traffic it can become a passive income stream, but until you star generating sales, there is no money coming in.

In comparing the two ways of making money online, with freelancing you’ve got a way to get started quickly and a way to make money quickly. With affiliate marketing it takes time to get your sites set up and get the traffic flowing before you will start making money, however, the potential for making more money is greater with affiliate marketing because of the fact that you can keep setting up more and more affiliate sites, which will continue to build on your income streams.

Freelancing and affiliate marketing are just two of the many different business models when it comes to making money online. Visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover more about Internet Marketing today.

Entrepreneurship in the online world is simply about transferring those skills of taking an idea to market, seeing an existing need and filling it and creating new ways of doing things to the digital marketplace. Rather than dealing with a brick and mortar location and attracting foot traffic for their new ventures, online entrepreneurs focus on generating web traffic by satisfying the needs of their online visitors for elegant solutions to their challenges.

What is an entrepreneur?

The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics defines entrepreneurship this way:  “An entrepreneur is someone who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise. An entrepreneur is an agent of change. Entrepreneurship is the process of discovering new ways of combining resources. When the market value generated by this new combination of resources is greater than the market value these resources can generate elsewhere individually or in some other combination, the entrepreneur makes a profit.”

Source: econlib.org/library/Enc/Entrepreneurship.html

To describe entrepreneurs as, agents of change and people who assume risks is just scratching the surface. The word entrepreneur conjures up images of trailblazers like Richard Branson, who see a need, create a business to fulfill that need and get compensated handsomely for it.

How is entrepreneurship different in the online world?

In the online world, entrepreneurs often focus either on creating software and information products, which can be purchased online and delivered instantly without intervention at the customer’s convenience, or on creating an entire online business that can then be sold. The true entrepreneur always has some kind of business venture brewing. Their passion is creating a thriving enterprise from a nugget of an idea, or even taking a struggling business, reviving it and selling it at a profit.

The Internet provides the perfect venue for entrepreneurs because there is so much opportunity to start a business from a single idea and get it going without a large amount of financial investment unlike starting a brick and mortar business, which has a whole host of expenses including the physical location and inventory.

The word “entrepreneur” taken from an archaic French verb, entreprendre, which means, “to do something” or “to undertake,” so by the nature of the origins of the word, entrepreneurs are those who use their talents and ingenuity to do something to change the world, and they always find a way to get handsomely rewarded for their efforts. Out of the big successes that entrepreneurs bring about, the world is changed. For example, Apple, now one of the wealthiest companies in the world, was started by two men in a garage. The massive Wal-mart chain began from a single store in Arkansas, and Ford Motor Company, started by Henry Ford, brought a product to market that has without exaggeration, changed the entire world.

In the online world, youtube.com is a prime example of entrepreneurship in action. It was about seeing a need, filling it and getting rewarded handsomely for it. Youtube.com was developed, as the story goes, by three college friends because of the challenges they faced sharing a digital video among themselves. Now, who can imagine an Internet without Youtube?

Whether online or in real life, entrepreneurship is about taking action on your ideas, and finding a way to create a profit.

If you are looking for more information about entrepreneurship online, or how to start your own business venture, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will discover lots of actionable information about Internet Marketing today.

Webinars, or online seminars, are a great format for selling digital information products and software. Webinars are also an effective format for generating leads for service providers, but one of the really cool things about a webinar is that you can actually use the webinar format to create an information product. Let’s take a look at some of the various types of products that you can sell using webinars.

Using webinars to sell information products

Webinars are an effective way to sell information products to a large number of people at one time. A webinar is a live event that you invite participants to attend. Webinar attendees register for the event by entering their name, email address, and in some case their telephone number. If you ask for a mobile phone number, then you can send them a text message reminder prior to the webinar starting.

A webinar in order for it to be an effective sales tool, can’t be just a long infomercial. If you are selling information products, you must deliver useful content that participants will be able to take action on and make use of even if they never buy a thing from you. When you provide value to your audience, answer their questions you increase the Know, like and trust factor that your audience wants to have before they are going to buy from you.

After you have delivered the valuable content that you promised to your attendees in exchange for their time and attention in considering your offer, then you can present the information product, or software to them. They are more likely to be receptive to your offer after they have seen your willingness to provide valuable content to them first.

When you are selling downloadable information products or software, make sure that you test everything before the webinar begins to make sure that all of the links lead to the correct download pages. Make sure that you will have support staff on hand in the event that there is a rush of orders and users who might need immediate assistance.

Selling services using webinars

To sell services using webinars you could format the presentation as an interview with an expert who is describing the details of the service, how attendees might attempt to do the service themselves, and then show how much money, time, energy and frustration they would save if they were to hire your company to perform the service for them.

Creating a product using webinars

To create an information product using a webinar, you would invite attendees to participate in the event where you will be teaching them how to do something, how a process works, how to use a piece of software, etc. You walk the participants through the process live on the webinar, answering questions and sharing lots of valuable tips and expertise.

After the webinar, you can then edit the program and save it as a presentation that you can then sell as an information product. You can package that presentation with other content on that topic, or as a standalone product.

You will see that the webinar format allows you to try lots of different ways to sell different kinds of products to different audiences. Experiment and see what works for you.

If you want to learn more tips and strategies for using webinars to grow your business, you are welcome to visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover lots of different ways to make money online.

Webinars are a very popular way to present information to large groups of people at one time. They are the online version of a live seminar, but you get to save on the travel costs and the hassles of renting a hotel conference room for your live event. You will, however, have to deal with choosing the right webinar service and setting everything up so that your webinar will go smoothly. Because everyone has different needs and requirements, there is no single ‘best webinar service,’ out there. We’ll take a look at some of the features available with the various webinar services, and you can decide which services you need for your webinar.

Pricing for webinar service providers

Webinar service prices are based on the number of participants you are expecting, so you can choose your best option when you know whether you will have 50 or 500 attendees at your web event. Of course, price is not the only criteria for making your selection, but if you have a budget you must have a pretty firm grasp of the number of attendees you will be dealing with.

Recording the webinar

Some providers will record the webinar for you automatically. With other providers you will need to run separate software and remember to set it up before you begin the webinar.

Desktop sharing and whiteboard sharing during a webinar

Will you be sharing your desktop or a whiteboard during the webinar? If so you want to make sure that the service you use allows you to do this.

Number of presenters

If your presentation requires several presenters who will be in different locations, some webinar services can accommodate this and others may not.

Live Polling

This feature allows the presenter to poll the audience and then share the results of the poll with the audience in real time.

Text Chatting

This allows participants to ask questions and get them answered in real time. This is a useful feature that makes webinars very powerful.

Once you know how many participants you will be expecting, and you’ve got an idea of the kinds of services that you need for your event, you can start reviewing the various webinar services available. A good idea is to find out what other people’s impressions were of the service. Make sure you talk to people who have actually hosted a live webinar using the service that you are considering using. Ask them what their impression of the company’s customer service was. When you run into a technical glitch in the middle of a webinar, you want to be sure that the company you are working with will be responsive to your needs and solve your technical issues quickly.

Choosing the right webinar service provider is a combination of which company offers the features you want at a price that fits in with your budget. It’s helpful to choose a service that is scalable, so that as you grow and have more and more attendees, that webinar service provider will still be able to meet your needs.

For more tips and ideas about using webinars to grow your online business, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog where you’ll discover lots of resources for making money online.

Webinars, which are the Internet version of a live seminar, can be either a live event where the presenter and participants are interacting in real time, or they can be pre-recorded and then replayed several times. Webinars have become a powerful way to reach lots of prospective customers at once, but they are also a great format for selling downloadable information products online. In this article we’ll take a look at how you can get started using webinars to sell information products.

What product will you be offering?

The first step in selling information products using webinars will be to decide what product you will be offering to your audience. The type of product will have some bearing on the format of your webinar. For example, if you are selling a ‘how-to’ course, the webinar might be instructional where you walk participants through how to do a specific task.

Choosing a webinar service provider

There are several webinar service providers and you can choose the one that best suits your needs and your budget. Here are some of the top webinar providers:

• Cisco’s WebEx
• Go to Webinar
• MegaMeeting

Some of the features of these webinar providers include:

• Real-time screen sharing
• VoIP
• Webcam Compatibility
• Embedded video sharing
• Full duplex support (allows participants to communicate at the same time)
• Polling (allows the presenter to poll the audience and present the results in real time)

Composing your presentation

You can use any kind of presentation software such as PowerPoint, or some of the free, online solutions such as Prezi, SlideRocket, or Google docs Presentations.

As you prepare your presentation, remember to keep it as simple as possible so that you do not distract viewers with flashy graphics. Be sure to include lots of relevant content that your participants will be able to use immediately. If it turns out to be an hour long commercial for your product, people will not be as happy to buy from you. But if you provide lots of value, and they come to know, like and trust you, then they are more likely to want to purchase what you have to offer.

Marketing your webinar

Once you have finished putting the presentation together, you’ll want to spread the word about your event. Create a landing page where participants can register for the webinar by leaving their name and email address.  You can also request a phone number and send a text message reminder to their phone before the webinar starts.

Next you would set up an email list which you can use to keep in contact with subscribers. Be sure to send out reminders to ensure the highest attendance possible. You can offer to send a link to the recording of the webinar only to those who have registered. You can also use email to follow up after the webinar is over, send them a link to the replay and invite them to your next webinar event.

Webinars can be a fun way to make money selling information products. Take the time to research the various providers, and practice your presentation and soon you will have a winning program.

There are lots of other ways to sell information products online in addition to webinars. For more information you are welcome to visit http://mcreasite.com/blog for lots of tips and strategies for making money online.