New Florida Business Idea – Amazon Affiliate

If you’re looking for a business to start from your home-office in Florida – you might consider becoming an Amazon affiliate.

Virtually whatever niche you want to get involved in, child-care products, childrens games, cooking Chinese food, or fixing air conditioners – you can find products on Amazon to sell for commission on your website(s).

Amazon affiliates place custom ads on their site that sell whatever it is they wish to sell. This is in contrast to using Google Adsense, which is not so highly targeted. The result – and it gets better as your niche is more specialized (smaller) – is that you have a higher click through rate, and probably higher rate of sales than you would on Adsense. Amazon goes by commission also – not payment per click. So, whereas the most you could hope for is a dollar or so per click using Adsense, you can make $100 off one sale at Amazon.com as an affiliate if the person clicking your ad buys a lot of things.

First go to Amazon.com and sign up as an affiliate, or, click this link:

Amazon Associates

Once you login you’ll see a grey bar at the top of your page – you can click this graphic:

Which will take you back to Amazon so you can search and find books or other products you want to add to the html code of your website.

When you are on a page you want to promote with an ad – click the “Link to this page” link at the upper left hand side in this grey bar.

This will allow you to create a link which will have your affiliate code (associate code) in it – giving you credit for anything bought after clicking the link on your website.

Amazon has books, ebooks, electronics, and all sorts of things for sale. Pick a category that you are very interested in and start writing about that category – create a post everyday, or, ideally – a couple of posts each day. Add links liberally to your posts – linking to items you talk about in your articles.

Many people are making extra money like this… some are making a living off it. This is their entire job. Sound interesting? Give it a try.

Don’t forget to incorporate your new Florida business after you get started. Incorporation provides many benefits you should read up on – and come back here to incorporate when you’re ready. We have the lowest incorporation prices for the major providers.  Try us! We have had over 10,000 customers in the past decade.

Best of luck to you!

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!” ->

How Can You Monetize Your Florida Business Blog?

If you have a Florida business already, and you’ve incorporated with Florida State, you either have something to sell and a way to make money, or you don’t. You might have, like we did at one point in time – incorporate JUST to build a website (blog) and have that BE the money-maker.

A blog / website that brings a lot of viewers on a daily basis, can make money in many different ways. Like a paper magazine, a blog can offer visual advertising and sell blocks of space on the site for a monthly fee. Some sites make a couple of thousand dollars a month this way. The norm for a a decent site is probably < $1,000. Which, if it’s free money coming in every month – is not something to ignore – right?

Some people run PPC (Pay Per Click) ads on their business websites. I’d not recommend that, but some people do it and you could do it too if you have nothing better to sell. If you were focused on a particular Florida niche you could take paid reviews on your blog. That means you could offer that, for a set fee, $100 perhaps, you would accept a well-written article that advertises something available to Florida viewers. The article would typically become part of your website, permanently.

The hardest piece of the business blogging puzzle is… traffic. Getting people to come to your site to read what you have, view what you have (photos,videos), is the toughest part of it all. When you have a thousand people coming to your site a day – all focused on getting information about one thing – you can monetize it (make money) from that traffic rather easily. It’s a numbers game really.

Look more into blogging… it might be right for your Florida business.

What is Typical Cost for Florida Incorporation?

How much would you pay to put a significant layer of protection between your personal assets and your company in the case of a lawsuit. A lot right? Relax, incorporation costs very little when compared with what it can do for your peace of mind. Everyone should incorporate as soon as possible to save the stress of worrying about what could happen in the future, because literally anything could happen in the future.

The basic Florida incorporation process can be accomplished at most official state websites, however, few people actually use these websites incorporate their businesses. Why is that? The official state sites, created by government workers following myriad rules and committee directives are not easy to understand for the average person. Many mistakes are made, and sometimes they are costly. For this reason many people choose to go with a company offering incorporation services.

Here are the two best reasons for using a company to help you prepare your incorporation application to the state you’re registering your business in:

1. Their incorporation application is reviewed and any obvious discrepancies are caught before going to Florida State – thereby removing the possibility that the state will reject your application due to a typo, or spelling mistake.

2. As I said, the process for incorporating at the state sites is not intuitive and it is very easy to make a mistake not only in syntax or spelling, but in the process. You might neglect to fill out forms you need to – and miss a deadline for instance.

The companies that specialize in helping you prepare your application give a valuable service, and some have been helping people incorporate for over a decade.

The variation in price among companies that help you incorporate your business is great. To register a profit corporation with rush service and help filing the subchapter S (s-corp) with the IRS you could pay as little as $239 for a complete incorporation with Corporations Division of Florida, or for the same incorporation pay over $400 at LegalZoom. Legalzoom has massive advertising campaigns to pay for – they even have Superbowl ads. Their incorporation service is greatly overpriced, but many go with them because they are the biggest provider of incorporation services.

Fair prices for incorporation fees in Florida are about $250 for Profit, non-profit, and s-corp filings and about $300 for LLC (Limited Liability Company) filings. At this price the company helping you file receives a small commission and helps to ensure your application passes the state review on the first submission.

Shop around before you incorporate. If you think you can follow your official state website well enough to register your business without incident, give it a shot. Some do incorporate that way, but few feel comfortable with the process.

Florida Incorporating Costs: What’s Fair?

If you’ve been shopping around before you do your incorporating you’ve surely found out one thing. There are dozens of websites to choose from. The next fact you quickly become attuned to is that each site offers to help you complete your Florida company incorporation for varying amounts of cash.

What is a fair rate for Florida incorporating costs?

We don’t really pretend to know what’s fair or not – we have been charging the same rate for Florida incorporating costs on our sites for nearly a decade. What we did originally was this…

We looked at all of our competition – just four companies back then, and we priced our service lower than all of them. We had no idea how much it would cost us per person to incorporate them and we didn’t understand the whole process quite frankly. The first few months in 1999 were eye-openers and we didn’t make much money at all. We knew we wanted to keep our prices fair and reasonable – but really didn’t know what that was. We decided on $195 for all types of Florida incorporation except the LLC, which we put at $265.

Fast forward to 2009. There are now over sixty companies competing in the same space. Google loves us because we were one of the first, so we have that going for us.

We’ve helped over 10,000 new businesses incorporate in Florida and we’re helping more than 1,000 each year. We’ve had not one person complain about our rates – so we know we’ve got our incorporation services priced fairly and reasonable.

We’ve seen companies come and go – but, this LegalZoom is taking another approach entirely. You’ve seen their ads on TV and heard them on radio. I’ve seen them on the internet. They are spending millions and millions of dollars on advertising. It’s the American way – right? Spend 10,000,000 in advertising to get $15,000,000 in sales. It’s an amazing business and it’s running full-steam ahead. All of this success despite the fact that they charge a couple of hundred dollars more for the basic incorporation than we do here at Start Florida Business because they don’t offer what everyone really needs unless you’re ordering the most expensive – level 3 package.

Here we do it quite differently. We add on no extra incorporating costs. We GIVE YOU the help you need to incorporate your Florida Subchapter S, Non Profit, or LLC. We process your forms the SAME DAY and don’t charge any extra fee. With LegalZoom and other companies sometimes your incorporation isn’t processed for weeks.

So, just some differences between us and them.

If you’re sure you want to incorporate. If you’re sure you don’t want to spend a couple hundred dollars for extras you probably don’t need. If you’re sure you want to incorporate today – and not wait for weeks of processing, incorporate with us at one of our 4 online forms:

Subchapter S Incorporation >

Profit Incorporation >

LLC Incorporation >

Non-Profit Incorporation >