Online Florida Business Ideas – Life Coaching!

Here’s something that many of you probably never considered as a possibility for your new Florida business. If you’ve got your stuff together – if you’re doing well at work, or with family, or with life in general… you might think about this online Florida business – Life Coach.

Life coaches can work in all different areas of life. You need not be an expert coach in every part of life, but here are some areas you could specialize in:

• Religion
• Careers – writing, managers, vice presidents, CEO’s, etc.
• Motivation
• Positive Energy – Happiness
• Grief Counselor
• Addictions
• Sports Coach
• Fitness Coach – different from sports coach in that you use a variety of exercises to reach the client goals

I have a friend, Nick, that I grew up playing soccer with…. he was an excellent soccer player, and then over time – he is now a successful Life Coach at BoundlessSuccess.com. He hired a graphics artist from South America to do his logo and site graphics. He has been a manager in a Chicago business for a number of years, has his MBA, and just decided – it was time to work for himself.

If you’re sitting there in Florida and wondering what you could do for an online business – consider Life Coaching. Don’t forget to incorporate to protect your personal assets!

Online Florida Business Ideas – S E O

SEO, search engine optimization, encompasses whatever you can do for your website to start appearing at the top of search engines. There is basically one search engine you want to rank for at the momen t- and taht is Google. It used to be easy to rank at the top of Google queries for your business or product, and now it is not.

What are some of the things you can do to help other Florida businesses to rank high in the search engines on terms and phrases important to them?

1. Build a quality site that people want to see, use often, and recommend to their friends.

2. Mention the business url in Twitter.com tweets occasionally.

3. Add video to YouTube about the Florida business, and link to it from your videos.

4. Add external links to the business website. These should not be paid links, but this is how most big companies get links… If someone turns you in for offering paid links – your search engine rank will suffer. To me, it isn’t worth playing that game. You might win for a short while, but then someone could turn you in at any moment.

5. Make a title tag for each page – and keep it unique, and applicable to what is on the page. Use your keywords on pages, but don’t overdo it. About 5% saturation for keywords on a page – in the text body – is about right.

While there are plenty of businesses that need to do better in search engines, there are many more individuals that would pay for it if they knew the benefits it could bring. It’s up to you as a budding SEO pro to show them what those benefits are… fame, glory, selling a product or service, getting subscribers, doing large surveys – whatever it is… we can all use traffic to our websites.

This is a tough Florida business to make successful, but, when you crack that nut – it offers a great way to work from anywhere in the world – and make decent money for a long, long time.

Good luck with your efforts!

Online Florida Business Ideas – Flipping Sites

Website flipping – creating a functional website, usually that makes some money, and selling it for profit.

One online Florida business you may have not considered is flipping websites. This is a little different than domain flipping, as you will develop a website on the domain – the website will probably sell something, though it’s possible that it will not be making any money itself when you sell it. People need websites for all sorts of reasons, some have businesses, some need an outlet for their grumbling, or creative writing. All of them will pay for it if they can’t develop the site on their own.

What sort of topic sells easily when flipping websites?

Good question, and it varies so widely. Personally I know a couple of areas that are decent, and sometimes very lucrative – but, you always need a buyer. Finding a buyer can be difficult, and a long process – but, if you build the site and have it working – you aren’t really on a time schedule… especially if you’re making some money from the site as it is… just maintain it and grow it – and eventually you’ll find a buyer, or decide that you’re making enough easy money to just keep the site for yourself.

I’ve done this many times over the years. I create a site with the idea of selling it. I build it up… I try to sell it. I cannot sell it for months, or years, then I realize… I’m OK just holding onto it. The site has become an asset. It’s making me money every month. Why not just keep it? And so I do.

Website flipping is pretty much a win-win, as long as you’re choosing good niches and you can make some cash with your site whether you sell it or not. The development of the site costs money, so unless you are a web developer yourself – you aren’t likely to be building sites and flipping them. It just costs too much to pay someone else to do it.

There are many online businesses you can start in Florida – make sure you incorporate to protect your personal assets as much as you can – regardless what business you start.

New Florida Business Ideas – Blogging

A blog is short for Web Log. Blogging is the act of putting together information on a website with a timeline, and sharing that information with other Florida web surfers.

Blogging is rather essential for your business these days – whether you have an online store, or just a blog to cover what you’re doing in your brick and mortar store. If you’re frequently telling people about what is going on with your Florida business – you’ll have a much better chance of having more and more people come by your blog to take a look.

Your blog can be a sort of journal for your Florida business – you can tell how you went about the incorporation process, for instance. You can tell about a sale you have coming up. You can run a poll and ask visitors what they want to see on your blog. You can post photos of your workplace, properties, staff that work in your business, and even post videos of processes you use, items you make, or services your business offers.

Setting up a blog for your busienss is not difficult. You might choose wordpress.com, blogger.com, or wordpress.org to get started. If you start a blog at blogger.com or wordpress.com you can move it to your own domain name, like “yourfloridabusiness.com” with a minimal effort. If you choose to start a wordpress.org blog – you’ll already have your own domain name.

Look into blogging – it will help your business get off the ground after you incorporate with us here at Start Florida Business (.com).

Should Your First Online Business Be EBooks?

One great way to begin your first ebusiness is to start selling a product that is easy to create… on your own. Your products have the best chance of making it in the market place and giving you substantial enough income to quit your day job because you can make the most profit from selling your own products. Sell someone elses product and you will likely get a 50% or 60% commission. This is typical in most online industries.

If you create your own eproduct – an eBook for example, you can sell that eBook for $14.99 to $39.99 and besides the financial processing fees for accepting credit cards – you’ll get the rest. Create your own product an you will also be able to offer it to affiliates to sell at 50% of commission. By creating your own eBooks you’ll be getting the most income per product sold as you possibly can. eBooks, or any electronic product that doesn’t really exist tangibly where you can hold it – is a remarkable way to make money because the supply is unlimited. The delivery instantaneous, and the perceived value can be much higher than a regular paperback book.

The very first step is to incorporate your new business as soon as you’ve decided on a name and domain name for it. If you don’t protect your personal assets you may lose everything. Incorporating is a great way, to protect your personal assets from court cases against your new business, it’s easy, and you’ll get tax breaks. Incorporating is the best way to do that and avoid double taxation using Subchapter S or LLC type incorporations.

Creating Your eBook

eBooks are easy to make and easy to sell online because you can just give your customers a download link after they pay for it. eBooks can be created using any word processing program you like, and then move it to Microsoft’s Word program for easiest conversion to eBook formats. Add photos, and you can turn your eBook into a PDF file with free online converters. There are a number of programs you can buy for $99 and less that convert your document into Adobe PDF compatible eBooks, there is no need to spend over $500 for Adobe Writer.

eBooks can be of much shorter length than typical paperback books. 50-70 pages is the ideal length for an information filled eBook. Go bigger than that and readers’ eyes may tire reading on the computer screen. eBook readers are getting better, but right now Amazon’s Kindle has the easiest to read screen, and the features on the machine are not anything to brag about. Give us another year and things should be looking way up.

Keep your eBooks to a low number of pages and jam-packed with information, photos, graphs, and soon even videos as eBook technology catches up to the web browsing experience. Offer previews to show potential buyers what the style of your eBook is, and to entice them to buy. Don’t show your first chapter if your first chapter isn’t your best. eBooks are selling online for $5 to $100. For an information filled eBook about a timely topic – and that offers novel information you may be able to get $39 for it. Be careful pricing too low. We had some eBooks at $8 for a while, and then finally raised the price to $14.95. They sold much more at the higher price. The perceived value is what’s important to the customer. At $8, your eBook may seem like junk.

Offer bonuses along with your eBook and you’ll notice they have a great effect. Sell your eBooks on your site, through PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns, using affiliates, and any other way you can think of. Don’t forget to collect email addresses and permission to email your customers to alert them of future eBooks you put out. Repeat sales can be a tremendous source of future revenue. Don’t stop at one eBook. As you build the number of products you have to sell you can eventually create a full-time job for yourself as a writer of eBooks. Remember the first step – incorporate!

Is It Possible to Start an Online Business for < $1,000?

If you’ve been wondering how people start online businesses for as cheap as $1,000 – this article will tell you how to do it too. Many people have an idea that starting a business need be expensive, ebusiness or traditional brick and mortar. I can tell you that for online business – you can get started for about a grand.

If more people knew how little it cost to get up and running with their own online business – more would take the plunge. Most people can afford to create a business online, but don’t even know it.

One simple way to get started is to create a product or service for yourself. In this example we’ll say you’ve created an ebook that answers some problem that many people face. The ebook is 70 pages long and full of your personal experience and wisdom from around the globe on the topic because you did a lot of research. Better to put out the best ebook on the topic than something with marginal value – agreed?

What would your costs look like to setup a website selling this ebook?

1. $195 – Register your new corporation with Colorado state. Let’s say it’s a Limited Liability Company, (LLC).

2. $ 75 – Choose a domain name and get a year of website hosting for your site at Godaddy.

3. $200 to 400 – Hire someone hourly to give you an introduction to WordPress.org websites and help you setup your first site. For another $79 you can purchase either the Thesis or WP Ellie theme so you’ll be up and running in no time as they are very user-friendly. The consultant you just hired can teach you how to maintain the site yourself – adding posts, pages, links, photos, mp3s, and videos.

4. Use PayPal to accept payments on your new website – it’s free and allows world wide orders. As an alternative – and a payment processor that uses PayPal and delivers your ebook securely to paying customers, try E-Junkie for $5 per month.

5. Another step is setting up a mailing list for visitors and customers so you can retain their email address and email them later about new products and services you have. Currently Aweber is the number one company for this, and they only charge $20 per month for a basic account which includes everything you need to get started.

6. You will probably want to hire a graphics designer or an ebook finisher that can, for about $250 make your ebook look very professional.

That is about all the basic expenses you will have setting up your first online business. It comes to $950 if you use the highest figures I mentioned above. Your recurring payments would be just $25 per month.

Though this was a very simple example, it just shows that if you want to sell one product that you create yourself – you can, for less than $1,000. If your website is more involved it might cost you $2,000 – primarily for web development.

Once your first business is setup guess how much it will cost to add another product?

Nothing, using the services I mentioned above – unless you need someone to create some graphics or do some other specialized work for you. Why not use today to think about some possibilities for online businesses you could start?

What is the Ultimate Part-Time Online Business?

The ideal part-time business contributes to your bottom line, and should be fun as well. Find out how hundreds of first time authors are making money by doing something they love.

You probably have a full-time job now and you probably don’t think you have enough spending money. What should you do? Work more hours for “the man”?

What about take on another job where you’re making someone else more money than they’re paying you? What about creating something for yourself? That’s the focus of this article – creating something for yourself that’s tangible and has worth and that you own the rights to.

So far today I made $31.50 at Amazon selling something. Last month I made over $900 from selling on Amazon. The things I’m selling cost me nothing to create except time. In my off-time I created some things that are now selling pretty well at Amazon. This $900 is extra money that my family hasn’t counted on, but that we can use for what we like. Would it be nice to have a couple hundred dollars extra in your household?

The sour economy of the last few years has made us realize that we’re not as safe and secure in our jobs as we might have thought. Hundreds of thousands of people are laid off in the USA – and have been surviving month to month… some of them, day to day.

How could you take the edge off a bad economic situation? Have something extra coming in the side door.

Creating an online informational product – an ebook in particular, can be the solution you’re looking for. I create ebooks. I have ten finished and my wife did two about Thai food recipes. It took some work, but we’re finally seeing some benefit to it. We’re finally making enough cash that makes us both wonder – could we just work 100% on ebooks and make a living at this?

Could you? Is there something you’re interested enough in to write an ebook about? You need not know all the information to put in the ebook yet, you can research first and pull it all together. The top novelists in the world – even for fiction books, do a tremendous amount of research about things they are clueless about, before they write their books.

Getting started writing ebooks is probably the easiest and ultimate part-time online business you can get started with. Everyone has an interest in something they could write a book about. Translate that interest into 30-100 pages of informative content and you’ll have something you can sell to others also interested in it.

How to Start:

1. Research to see where there is a need for information. Query your habits, work skills, hobbies, and see if you can’t find something you’ve never seen explained well – or thoroughly. Do Google searches to see where there are few pages of information about a subject. Check Amazon’s list of best selling books and see what subjects sell consistently. Can you spin one of those subjects?

2. Write a book of 10,000 to 50,000 words. Ebooks are shorter than traditional paperback novels, by a significant amount. Reading from a computer screen or ereader device is taxing on the eyes and a 50 page ebook is about the right length. There are few subjects that can’t be thoroughly explained by 50 page ebook.

3. Create a cover. I use Paint Shop Pro to create my own covers. Sure they are not as good as a professional’s, but they work for now. I will likely invest in professionally made covers later as I’m making enough money to afford it.

4. Go to the following places and figure out how to sell your ebook online with them (all.com’s): eBay, Amazon, SmashWords. Most want your ebook in Microsoft’s Word format (.doc) so they can convert it to the other formats readable by the ebooks readers have.

5. Create more. If I had stopped at the first ebook I made, I’d be making about $2 per day. That’s not quite enough to make me happy. Sure $60 per month is enough for two nice dinners, but it doesn’t make sense to stop when creating ebooks is so easy and free.

I love the idea of investing in myself. You should too. Before you take another job for someone else – making them more money and giving yourself nothing to sell over your lifetime, try creating content that is yours and that you can sell indefinitely – with hardly trying. Once uploaded at Amazon, SmashWords, and other online ebook marketplaces – you need do nothing but collect checks. How’s that for a part-time side business? Give it a try and see if it works for you!

Small Business Exporting Podcast

International trade is something many small business owners wish they could get into and usually don’t because they assume the paperwork and administrative issues are too costly – timewise, and money-wise.

Florida is conveniently located to do business with a number of countries around the world – and not just those within 500 miles of it’s shores. The port of Miami receives and sends international goods by the tens of millions each year.

In this podcast these two business specialists touch on the massive opportunities that await the US small businesses choosing to tackled the international marketplace  – and the SBA’s (Small Business Administration’s) role in it.

Some highlights from this podcast:

Ron Johnson: Now Richard, what are the advantages of exporting and what might be required of a small business that wants to perhaps enter into the export marketplace?

Richard Ginsburg: Two thirds of the world’s purchasing power is in the hands of 96 percent of the world’s population, these two statistics should be incentive enough. Developing foreign markets provides a diversity of customers that generates significantly more transactions — that means sales — that surely will increase revenues and profits. Small businesses that export typically stay in business longer, create more jobs and pay higher wages to their employees. Exporters also can mitigate adverse economic conditions at home by having market penetration of foreign markets that still demand U.S. goods.

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Competing in the Global Market: SBA’s International Trade Programs
Featuring Ron Johnson interviewing Richard Ginsburg, Senior International Trade Specialist, SBA’s Office of International Trade.

( Transcript )

This was a podcast full of information. Hope you enjoyed it!

Starting a Florida Business: Pricing Your Product

Pricing your Florida business products or services might seem like a shot in the dark. It shouldn’t.

Pricing your business goods and services for the market is one of the most important areas of focus you’ll spend time on. You’ll continually revise prices until you find that balance where Florida consumer and Florida provider (you) come to an agreement about what your product or services are worth.

Here are some steps to go about figuring out pricing your products online. Luckily for you the internet has made competitive pricing research quite easy. Here are some tips for researching prices for similar items or services your Florida business will focus on:

Start your research on pricing your Florida business products / services at Google.com. Create very specific searches for your product. A search composed this way: “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale best price” will give you a slew of results that you can pick through. As you’re picking through you might notice that the prices seem high and you might want to find out what the lowest prices are… change your query to:  “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale lowest price” or “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale unbeatable price” or “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale lowest prices guaranteed”. Google allows for removing words from your query too. If you notice you’re getting a lot of results that don’t fit what you want to see – use a minus in front of the word that would get rid of those results like, use this query “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale best price -france”.

Have a look at EBay.com. Realize that these are often bottom rate prices and don’t include everything that you might expect to get with the product. A careful read of the description will point out any missing accessories or any special weirdness about the sale. Maybe it’s a 2nd hand item. Maybe it’s being shipped from Romania (beware of scams!). A little research on Ebay will quickly show you the bottom rate price others are selling for. Many buyers are afraid to complete Ebay transactions because of the number of scams going on. You may decide to try Ebay to help market your Florida products or services. Expect cutthroat competition.

Find your competition online. Companies give a lot of information away on their websites that would take you a lot of time to ask on the phone. Often times the real deals and sales happen over the phone once you’re talking to a salesperson that’s empowered to sell the items at a bigger discount than you see online. This might be a strategy you also employ with your Florida corporation.

Check prices for your items in Google Checkout, Yahoo Shopping, and major outlets like BestBuy or wherever similar goods and services are sold.

Value add. A very strong business practice is the value add. If you are able to come up with something to add to the Florida products and services your company offers you could jump ahead of the competition and create quite a profitable business just based on this simple idea. What would sell well with your product? If your product is the Nokia e71 mobile phone how could you really sell a lot of them? Offer a short tutorial booklet on how to unlock the phone when they receive it so they’re not tied to any one mobile carrier? Maybe offer a subscription to a mobile phone application software developer for a year for 1/3rd of the typical price? (you’d work it out with the developer so you’re still making a good profit)

Note: Make sure you have a good idea about the pattern of price drops for your items if you’re buying them from a supplier. You might purchase a phone at 60% discount from retail because you’re buying 50 of them. For a couple months you do fine, selling at 60% profit. Then, because Nokia comes out with the e81, price points for the e71′s drop substantially. Now you’re only making 20% from each Nokia e71 you sell. Can you live on that? Be careful especially with electronics devices since they are updated and outdated so quickly.

Pricing your Florida products and services is a tricky game. If you price close to what you’re competitors are charging you may be fine with that – you may not. Your competitors, other Florida companies may be buying 100 times what you’re buying from the supplier and getting a much better discount. What you don’t see can hurt you. Be cautious and smart when pricing your items for sale with your new Florida business! Pricing can make or break you.

Starting an Online Business

Since computers became prominent as a tool for business, and sometimes as the focus of the business entirely – the dream of starting an online business that makes money while you sleep has become a goal for a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs.

Most of us have some experience using computers – I know this because you’re on a computer right now reading this. The line dividing between computers and phone and other gadgets is blurring. There are already computers in everyday items like your refrigerator and oven.

Starting an online business requires these steps:

Step 1: The Online Business Idea – You might take an existing product you’re manufacturing in Florida and turn it into an e-product. You might leave it unchanged and sell it as a retail product online. You could create something digital… an e-book; an information packet; a website to accomplish some service or task that works online.

The possibilities are endless. You probably have some ideas what you would like to learn more about or try. Research like your life depended on it – copy an idea and change it slightly. Make it better.

Step 2: Your Domain Name – You may have one or multiple domains showcasing your products or services. Choosing a domain name is important, you should choose a name that is brandable. A memorable name that contains some keywords related to whatever your business is focused on.

If you’re selling snails by air… you could call it “escargotbyairmail.com”. Researching what the major keywords are you’re going to target online is an essential step. Don’t buy a domain name before you research everything there is to know about choosing one. There are some excellent bloggers tips out there about choosing domain names!

Some rules about choosing a domain name:

1. Keep it short. No more than 25 characters unless it’s really memorable.

2. Keep it memorable. Is it easily remembered?

3. Don’t use trademarked words or phrases in your name. Check the Trademark office!

4. Don’t use someone else’s domain name and add an “s” or a 1 at the end. You might have your name taken from you by the registrar for being too similar to someone else’s business.

5. Buy the .com and the .net and .info and .org domains at the same time. It will cost you another $50-60 but protect you from squatters hoping to sell the name to you later for a premium price.

Step 3: Website Hosting – Good hosts are easy to come by – and they’re cheap too. Competition has really brought down the price of a host. This site, Start Florida Business .com is hosted at Godaddy.com for about $90 per year. Yes, per year. Don’t let your web developer charge you $500 per year for bandwidth because Godaddy will offer you more bandwidth than your new site could find in 3 years – all for $90.

Step 4: Designing Your Online Business Site – Do yourself a big favor and don’t choose now to learn how to create your own website and hosting. This is a job best left to experts. As cool as you think it is to design your own site you will fail miserably the first 10 times you create a site. Don’t make your business fail because you don’t want to pay for a decent site. Think of how unprofessional some sites appear to you – and then picture your new business that you’re so proud of – with a lame site representing it. Your site is your business card presentation to the WORLD. Don’t cut corners, have it done right.

Step 5: Online Marketing – If there is anything that is more crucial to the success of your online business I haven’t found it. Online marketing is the absolute key to your success. It can make or break your company.

You will learn a whole lot about how to market online – from getting your company mentioned in directories such as mozilla.org and yahoo.com to getting links from other websites to your website. You really need to have a PhD level knowledge of internet marketing if you’re going to do it all yourself. A Bachelors degree at minimum if you’re going to hire someone else to take care of it.

Step 6: Search Engine Marketing – This gets a category separate from the previous because it’s of the ultimate importance for many businesses starting online. Search engines are so important because they give you free, targeted traffic to your site. Well, sort of free. The game has become a lot higher-stakes and there is competition for almost every phrase nowadays.

Hire a competent and fairly priced SEO / SEM specialist to optimize your site for the keywords your online business is focused on. Retain that person with a monthly fee to handle maintenance of your site and constant re-optimization for Google and Yahoo search engines. Nearly everyone just focuses on Google, but Yahoo is also important.

Or, learn it all yourself which will take about a year of full-time effort. You might still not be anywhere near as good as the SEO/SEM experts that have done it for 10 years though.

Step 7: Interactive Websites – You may just need some way for customers to complete a transaction online. This would be a minimum requirement. You need to decide early on what role your online presence – your website will play for your business. Are you trying to attract new customers? Is that the goal? If yes, you’ll need a way to capture their contact information online so you can contact them later. There are easy ways to do this and complicated ways to this. Most companies will offer something for free if the customer will sign up for their email blast. They collect email, phone, and other information to contact that customer later.

You might need a website that does the entire process for you – without any effort from you. These web sites typically rely on a database programmed by an expert web developer and are costly and buggy. Assess what you need and plan a way to get there. Be careful about investing too much in your online business up front. Probably you can do it for less for a couple months or years until you know a $20,000 website is what you can’t live without.

Step 8: Building a Customer Base – If your customers will come from mostly online efforts – how will you optimize that? There are whole sites dedicated to helping you do this. There are quite a few spammy sites too. Focus on the Small Business Administration of America’s site and other quality sites like business.com and that level of site. Basically all information is free about how to go about this – but, you might do well to pay someone to teach you about it. Up to you – and how you learn best.

Don’t forget – past customers can be a great source of new customers since they already know you. An email list of your customers is essential!

Step 9: Repeat Business – Current and past customers can be a significant source of business for you. Don’t forget the upsell too – when someone is purchasing something online they are much more likely to purchase something else related to the product or service at the same time. Offer a discount and you’ll likely get more sales instantly.

Step 10: Accounting and Taxes – Stay up to date with a good accountant familar with the intricacies of starting and maintaining your Florida online business.

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