New Florida Business Idea – Ebook Marketplace

I’ll just cover Amazon.com with this short article, but I encourage you to look at e-Junkie.com and other affiliate marketplaces that allow you to sell their ebooks for a commission.

Ebooks are gaining traction, and some say they have broken through and have become the ultimate way to publish and read a book. The ereaders of today offer book-buyers the ability to change the font type, font size, and the color and contrast of the fonts on the screen as one reads. The days of dusty, dingy yellow paperback pages with Times New Roman font – only – are finished.

Now, use this to your advantage and start your own ebook store using ebooks found at Amazon.com. Amazon has about 1 million ebooks you can sell on your own when you join their Amazon Associate program – which is what they call their affiliate program. Once you join you can build your inventory of ebooks to sell – in general, or in a smarter way – by grouping the books you sell into a niche. For instance, create a website about Travel in Alaska – and then sell all the ebooks Amazon has regarding travel in Alaska. If you want to also sell paperback books on commission – no worries, that can be part of it. It’s up to you really.

Ideally you’d use a WordPress.org website to get your ebook store up and running. I say that because HTML is going to be changing soon and incompatibility is going to be a problem in the next few years. Better to go with WordPress because you’ll stay current with the standards.

WordPress offers plugins which will help you sell your ebooks in a nice format – like a store, with product photos, and space for a short description and price. Team up with Paypal and create both buy it now buttons and “add to cart” buttons, so your customers can buy more than one book if they wish. Look into the different paypal accounts, there is a business account that might better suit you than the individual accounts most people start with.

When you create your new Florida ebook store – don’t forget to incorporate your new business by coming back here and filling out the form above that applies to the type of filing you want to accomplish. There might be no better first step for a business than incorporation.

Best of luck to you!

New Florida Business Idea – Lucky Charms?

Don’t laugh at this idea, I created the title to be funny. If that makes any sense!?

Though you yourself might not put any faith in lucky charms, there are millions of people that DO. Nobody on the planet ever thought for a second that rabbit’s feet were lucky to have on a keychain, until some company dreamed the idea up – because they knew where they could buy rabbit feet off dead bunnies.

If you think about it – it’s quite a gruesome thing… There are many other charms like this – tiger fur, tiger teeth, ivory charms, rhinocerus horn charms, and many other products made from endangered animals. Recently in southeast Asia they are selling tokay geckos for outrageous sums of money, because some people believe their tongue CURES HIV/AIDS. I’m not joking… the world is a superstitious place – even if you aren’t. I happen not to be, but that doesn’t stop us from having a Buddha amulet shop that sells to people that believe there is some sort of power or magic in the Buddha and other monk charms we sell.

Figure out what types of charms you want to specialize in and start finding resources that sell them. You might want to sell Christian crosses. You might want to sell Buddha charms. You might want to sell pagan jewelry. Whatever it is – choose a subject you have some interest in and start your business.

Typically you can mark up your charms by 200% and more. If you’re selling charms that go on a necklace or bracelet then you can also sell necklaces and bracelets – right? Add whatever else to your inventory that makes sense – and that fits in the niche.

Choose items in different price categories so you have something for everyone. You should have something for under $10 and something for over $100. The majority of your purchases should be under $30 – considered the magic number for online shopping.

Selling something online is smart, and your sales should grow year over year. We have seen growth based on how much inventory we have. The more you have available to sell – the more you sell and the higher your income from the endeavor.

New Florida Business Idea – Customer Service Company

Florida companies, and across the globe, companies are outsourcing everything possible from their company. When you have an online company this is generally easier, but every company needs some level of customer service. You can outsource it – believe it or not.

I mentioned in a previous article about how using Knownhost for web hosting was a good idea. Guess what? They outsource their entire customer service operation to another company.

I send my email to support@knownhost.com and it gets transferred through to another company. This other company probably handles customer service for other organizations as well. They have excellent support staff and I’ve never once had a complaint of any sort, to lodge against them. They’re, simply brilliant. They know how to do everything a webhosting company should know how to do. They are fast, accurate, and have helped me to do everything I’ve needed so far – which, has been a lot. Compare that to a customer service group like Godaddy.com has, and there is no comparison. Outsourcing customer service for knownhost.com works – very well.

If you want to provide the customer service for an organization you are going to have to be experts at what that company does. You’ll have to be polite and comprehensive in your support. You’ll need to use surveys to ask customers if they’re getting the right answers from you in a fast enough time. You’ll be proving yourself everyday to the company that hired you to provide its customer support.

Customer support is a subject that sometimes makes or breaks companies. Many companies are willing to outsource it – to take the stress of it all far away. Become a great customer service company and offer your services to large companies that need it. It’s one more way to start a new Florida business.

Don’t forget to incorporate your Florida business as soon as you get started!

Best of luck to you!

New Florida Business Idea – Web Hosting Company

I’ve thought of starting this business numerous times throughout the past decade, and I’ve just never got around to it. It is STILL a good idea if you know where to find people that would love to have a website, but don’t know how to get started with one.

What most people do now – that don’t want to be bothered with hosting, domain names, stats, and the rest of it – is start a blog on blogger.com or wordpress.com. It’s easy, takes 5 minutes, and you can have your own website. Sort of. You don’t own it. You can’t even put Google Adsense ads or other Javascript on a wordpress.com website. Your name will be something like startfloridabusiness.blogspot.com or startfloridabusiness.wordpress.com. Not many people are likely to even remember that you’re not on your own domain – and so they might just type into their browser – www.startfloridabusiness.com. Then we’ll take your customer!

If you’re starting a new Florida business – you would want your own domain name, no self-respecting business owner is going to be on wordpress.com or blogspot.com – it’s unprofessional, cheap, and quite frankly – a bit hokey and corny.

There are MANY people though, that try to run a business from sites like those. They can be your target market.

The thing about hosting is – anybody can do it. Setup a VPS account at Knowhost.com for $40/month and you can add unlimited domains to your account. Currently I have over 25 domains on my one account. I used to have my webhosting at Godaddy – which was very slow, and very poor as far as functions I could tweak… software I could add to the server, etc. Add to that the fact that each of my 30 domains was costing over $50 per year for webhosting. Switching to Knownhost saved me over $1,000 per year. That’s more than $80 per month. But, that’s not all… my sites are 3-5 times faster than they were at Godaddy.

So, apply what you’ve just learned to the webhosting idea… and you have a business. Open a Knownhost VPS account. Put a couple of your sites on it – to get the feel for what you can do. Experiment. Ask the support ANYTHING – they are tops in the hosting industry unless you’re talking about Rackspace.com which is 5-50 times as much money per month.

Target those that are trying to be taken seriously as businesses on wordpress or blogspot.com. Target those that are hosted at godaddy.com and have slow servers. Target anyone with slow website load times (use iwebtool.com to see how fast their site loads.). A fast site loads in 1 second or less. A slow site takes more than 2-3 seconds. Many people that were waiting for a site to load in their browser click away after 3 seconds – studies show. Your target market is anyone with a business website that takes 3 seconds or more to load.

Charge $20 per month and try to setup 100 accounts on your server. Minus your $40/month charge from Knowhost you’ll clear almost $2,000. Or, think bigger.

When you begin your new hosting business – come right back here and incorporate your new Florida business so the world takes you seriously, and so you can reap some of the benefits of incorporation.

Best of luck to you!

New Florida Business Idea – Online Researcher

You might be pretty savvy online and you know how to get questions answered that you have. In the past, I can say that there wasn’t anything that I wanted an answer to, that I couldn’t find within an hour. Today, that is changing, and I can’t say why for sure – but I definitely see it change.

I think it’s because of the overwhelming (many billions, perhaps trillions?) of pages of content online for the search engines to sort through. If the search engines can’t do it – then humans will again, have to sort through the results that don’t answer the questions and get it done.

That’s where you would come in, as an online researcher.

I’m not sure the position is that ubiquitous that you can hope to get many small jobs from many different people looking for information. It may be so, but I tend to think that in this career field you would be hired as an employee, or as a contractor (corp to corp) for a full-time type position doing research that helps a company do business on a daily basis.

This is fine, and if you form a company around this idea, you can choose to either just be a sole employee of the company you create – or, add others to the company that are also researchers – and take a commission off overall hours they work. Call your new Florida business an “Online Research Group”.

When you create your business, stop back here and incorporate in Florida for your piece of mind.

New Florida Business Idea – Video Editing Company

As video takes over as the most important content and media for the internet, the need for those that can edit video will increase substantially.

You might think that the video editing business is either something you know – and can open a business for, or you don’t know it – and can’t. Think about this – it’s learnable. It isn’t rocket science. It would take you just a couple of days to get up and running on a basic level… and some more weeks or months of studying under someone that knew what they were doing – to be proficient enough to call yourself a video editor. In fact, many things in the online world are like that. You can learn virtually anything you need to – if you have a good teacher that will take the time to show you the ins and outs of the business.

Pay that person to teach you – and learn all you can. Your money isn’t better spent any other way. Going to college to get a degree in computer science? For what? Learn programming on your own and pay someone to teach you. You’ll learn just the essentials of what you need to know – and not all the extra fluff that goes with a university degree.

The reason there is such a demand for video editors at the moment is because the medium – video – is in flux. There are so many different kinds of video you can shoot, and ways to convert it for various uses – that you have to know it all in order to create decent video.

Video is coming into play in many new ways lately. Publish a book at Amazon, Smashwords, or other venues – and be prompted to upload a video. Start a project on Kickstarter.com and you’ll need a video. Create a new Florida business website, and if you don’t have video of your products and services, or an explanation of what your company does – on video – you’re way behind the others in your same field that have video on their websites.

Video is no longer an ‘extra’, it’s becoming the standard. If you don’t have it – you’re falling behind. Start a video editing business in Florida and capitalize on the new group of people that need quality videos made for business and personal uses.

Get started today by creating your Florida Incorporation here at this site – with the forms above.

Need a Florida Business Idea? Online Digital Author! (Part 3)

See Part 1 of “Need a Florida Business Idea? Online Digital Author!” here – >
See Part 2 here ->

Step 8

Promote your ebook on Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler, your own websites… absolutely anywhere you possibly can. If you are selling your PDF’s on your own website you can sign up with eJunkie. They offer a payment solution, and delivery system for your ebooks so you need do nothing after it is setup. You’ll also need a PayPal account. E-Junkie has a marketplace too where other ebook sellers can sign up to sell your ebooks as an affiliate. This can increase your sales considerably.

Step 9

Repeat.

If you want to create a Florida business for yourself, for your family, for the rest of your lives… there are many businesses you can start. Being an author is something that might not seem possible to you at the moment, but, many first-time authors have said the same thing. Give it a try if you have a topic you know a lot about. Florida specific topics work too. Excellent topics for books might be, “Retiring in Florida”, “Best Florida Wade Fishing”, “Florida’s National Parks – On Foot”, just to give a few possibilities.

Step 10

When you create your new Florida business – don’t forget to incorporate. Incorporating in Florida gives you some benefits like more protection for your personal assets than you would have without it. Incorporation is cheap, and easy in Florida – you can do it here on this site in just minutes if you have the information required. Have a look at one of our incorporation forms to see the questions you’ll need to answer. Get the info and come back to place your incorporation order.

Good luck to you!

Need a Florida Business Idea? Online Digital Author! (Part 2)

If you missed Part 1 of “Need a Florida Business Idea? Online Digital Author!” – see it here ->

Step 4

Create a cover for your ebook. We highly recommend you hire someone to do it for you. Matt Thorp has done some of our covers (stringandink@yahoo.com). For Amazon you should create a color image – and the specs are found in the same place you upload the image on the author dashboard once you sign in.

For Smashwords you can add the color cover image to a Title Page – the first page of your ebook. Just make it as big as will fit on the first page. On the 2nd page you can add your title, author name, and publishing statement.

Step 5

Join Smashwords.com and Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (kdp.amazon.com) to publish your own books. Smashwords is great because they distribute your book to Sony, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and they are adding channels all the time. Smashwords has a strict formatting requirement and you’ll need to either develop your ebook FOR Smashwords as you edit, or, have 2 different versions – one for Kindle and one for Smashwords. It is not difficult to format for Smashwords, but again, it takes some time to remember all their formatting requirements.

Step 6

Submit to the above, and if you have a website of your own – you can create a PDF version of your book (with color photos if you want) to sell on your own. You keep all your profit this way, so it makes sense to offer your book on your own too.

Step 7

View your book on Amazon’s preview feature. You will likely need to edit your book again so it looks good on Amazon. If you don’t re-edit, you might have a high rate of returns on your ebook. Same with Smashwords, but, Smashwords will tell you when you run afoul of their formatting specs. What they won’t tell you is if your book looks good in the various formats they create for you. You should download your book at Smashwords in all the formats and take a peek at what it will look like to customers buying your book.

See Part 3 of “Need a Florida Business Idea? Online Digital Author!” ->

Need a Florida Business Idea? Online Digital Author! (Part 1)

If you’re having trouble coming up with a new Florida business – what about becoming an online digital author?

Sounds all complicated, but is it really?

This article (parts 1 – 3) will cover what you need to know to get started with your own Florida digital publishing business.

In the past you could write a book, submit it to a couple of hundred agents and publishers directly – have someone accept it, and have printed copies of your books sent all over the USA, or whatever country you’re from. After your book is written, the publishing process to paperback can take a year and longer.

Today it’s both easier and more difficult to arrange, but, you don’t need someone to print your books out on paper – you can publish your books digitally as ebooks from your Florida business office, bedroom, or in your car if you wanted.

Step 1

The first step is to write your book. Forget about photos at this point – just write it out in Word or some other word processing program. The free software from “Open Office” will allow you to create it just like Word, and converts to PDF very easily (built-in). You could start with that.

Step 2

Next you’ll want to edit your book, proofing for spelling, grammar, and whether chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and words are in the right place. Many authors find this part of the process the most frustrating. It’s hard enough to write a book, and then to do all the editing yourself can be overwhelmingly difficult. You might want to look for Florida editors in the online yellow pages, or, better yet – post something to friends on Facebook and Twitter and see if anyone can recommend a Florida book editor they’ve already used.

Step 3

Add photos, charts, other necessary graphics. You’ll need to research a bit to find out the specifications for photos that work best with ereaders like Amazon’s black and white “Kindle”. Once you get to know what works and what doesn’t for graphics in ebooks you’ll be on your way to a smoother production process. The first book is going to take much longer than successive books will take to write.

Smashwords distributes ebooks to Amazon as well – but you can opt-out of that if you want. See the distribution page to opt-in and out of channels.

Smashwords distributes to many channels that have color ebook readers (Apple has iPad, iPhone, iPod), Barnes & Noble has the color “Nook”. High contrast images work best for ereaders.

See continuation of “Need a Florida Business Idea? Online Digital Author!” in Part 2 ->

Online Florida Business Idea – Website Design

If you can design a site for yourself, you can likely do so for other people too.

Design your Florida business site, incorporate your business, and then get friends to comment on it – truthfully. See what areas you’re lacking in – and get them up to speed. If you already have a base and can make websites that work to some degree – it doesn’t take much to learn how to do it well. When you can do it well, you can get paid for it.

We use a webmaster that lives in southeast Asia. He’s good, and he works for $10-15 per hour, since we have such a big project for him to do. You might not be able to live on that, but could you live on $20 per hour full time and live in Florida? Sure you could – near anybody could.

It doesn’t take that much to be able to program – create websites at the $20 per hour rate and call yourself a “Florida business”. Incorporate using your name, “Michael Forest, Inc.” if you want. Online businesses are low-overhead, and when you create one – you create your own job. You have no boss. You have no set hours. You have nobody to answer to except whatever client you’re working with. You can structure contact hours and methods so they are ideal for you – and stress you out little.

When you first start out as a web designer, creating sites for other Florida businesses, or just personal sites for others there are a couple of friends you’re going to want to make.

One is a graphics person. Graphics are another beast than coding a website, and they are not that easy to do at a high level. If your skills are less than 9/10 – you’ll want to get to know a good graphics person that can help you when you need professional level graphics. The other person you’ll want to find is a database programmer. Databases power sites with search functions, membership sites, etc. Database programming is NOT intuitive and you’ll need help for a while – until you “get it”. You might choose never to get it – it’s really a specialty all it’s own.

So, if you can program and build a website now – any site. Get to wrok on your skills and ramp it up a notch… a couple notches. Turn it into an online job – and incorporate your new business.

Good luck to you!

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