As a novice at this, I missed a trick with my first bunch of articles because the titles I gave the articles were chosen to indicate that the articles formed a series. What I missed was that the titles need to be keyword-rich in order to have any chance of the articles being found through search engines. This meant that my articles got a few views as they briefly appeared on the ‘recently published’ list on EzineArticles.com, but once they had passed through there the viewing rate dropped off.

Having studied the business of Article Marketing a bit more by this time, I realised my mistake, and I went through the process of editing the articles to change just the titles, using keywords that would be used by my target audience when searching for information. Over a period of a few days I re-titled the group of articles and then sat back and waited for them to give better viewing rates.

When nothing happened, I tried searching for them myself, using the keywords that I had planned for – nothing. I tried the whole title – nothing. I tried the exact title, in quotes – still nothing. I tried searching directly in EzineArticles.com’s own search page (powered by Google) – absolutely nothing. I tried in the search page using my old titles, and found the articles easily.

Interestingly, Google doesn’t find the new titles on my own blog either.

It is well known that Google ‘likes’ both EzineArticles.com and WordPress blogs. It seems to me that Google must be using some knowledge of the structure of both to save re-processing ‘old’ articles, perhaps using an article ID rather than the article title, with the side effect that changing the title of an existing article does not cause the title to be re-indexed. So, there is no benefit at all in re-titling existing article, and it would be much better to leave the old article an write a new one to use your brilliant, keyword-rich, search engine-friendly title.

Let’s face it, working a job is like working a treadmill, and for most of us there’s no getting off. We work 40-50 hours per week for 40-50 years, then we retire and have time to relax – but not the money we need to enjoy it.

There has to be a better way.

There is, but nothing’s for free. The biggest thing it’s going to cost you is a change of mindset, followed by some time and effort. You have to DECIDE that you are not going to stick on that treadmill forever, that you WILL be wealthy (whatever that means to you), and that you WILL do what it takes to get there.

What it takes can be described in just one word – ASSETS. Now, when you talk to your banker or your insurance agent, they will class as an asset anything that you have acquired – your house, car, boat, tv, clothes, sports equipment, all those consumables that have soaked up your cash. But in reality, they are not assets, they are on the COST side of your balance sheet.

The real assets that you need are things that are capable of generating an income without you actually having to be present. So, if you have your own business, but you have to be directly involved for it to operate, it’s not an asset in this sense – it’s a job. You need to make your business work without you being there, so what you do for your business is define the systems that make it work, rather than actually do the work yourself – then your business is truly an asset.

You can acquire assets by investment. Instead of spending everything on consumables, make a decision to use a part of your income for investment, every time you get some income, all the time. The investment can be property for rental, stocks and shares, equipment that can be rented out, anything that can generate an income.

A good multi-level marketing organisation can be an asset too. By expending effort to build a team of distributors you can develop an asset that generates an income without your presence – your team continues to find customers and recruit further distributors, so you receive an income without your continued effort – just the kind of asset we are looking for.

The better way is to develop passive, recurring income. This means that you receive income on an ongoing basis after doing the work just once. Of course, you can do a series of pieces of work, and receive an ongoing income from each of them. Then you can go about living your life, and the income keeps coming in. There are lots of ways of doing this:

• Become an author – write the book once, it sells for ever
• Become a pop star – make the record once, get paid every time it is played on the radio
• Become a movie actor – make the film once, get paid every time it shows on TV

OK, maybe these options are not available to most of us. But there is a pattern in there – in each case, an ‘asset’ has been developed which has a never-ending repeat sale value. That is something that we can all do, one way or another. The key is the creation or acquisition of assets which can be used subsequently to generate income.

What constitutes an asset? In this context, an asset is something which is capable of generating an income. Just because it has a value, does not make it an asset. Consumer items depreciate once they have been acquired, so they don’t count. Cars, TVs, fancy clothes – they all consume money, not create wealth. By some measures, even your main home, if mortgaged, is not an asset because you are putting money into it, not extracting income. On the other hand, investment property that generates rental income definitely does fit the bill.

Running a regular business only counts if you can make it work so that it doesn’t need you. It has to be something you can leave in the hands of your employees, or you are still trading your time for money. To achieve this you need to arrange your business systems so that you simply provide the overall guidance.

There are other kinds of business that you wouldn’t call ‘regular’, that can give the passive income that we are looking for. Some of these businesses you would probably start as an add-on while you work the full-time job. But that’s a subject for another article!

Of course they mean well – they want the best for us, and the only way they know is the way they were taught. But what it means is that we work hard to get what we need, then work even harder to get more. We work more and more, harder and harder, and we end up just living to work, then suddenly we get to the end and retire, and there’s nothing – these days, most of us don’t even get a decent pension, so we end up trying to maintain a lifestyle with a third or a quarter of what we were struggling to do it with before.

There has to be a better way.

The obvious ‘better way’ is to start your own business – get more freedom, choose when you want to work, choose what you want to do, no boss to push you around, make lots of money. So we say ‘I can do a good job at XXXX’, set up the XXXX Corporation and go to it. Then we work hard to get what we need, then work even harder to get more. Then on top of that we have to do all the other things that a business needs, because there’s nobody else to do them. Unfortunately, for most of us the reality is that most businesses stay small and the owners end up working harder than ever, have to do everything to run the company and not doing the things they love, managing staff is like running an adult daycare centre, the only way to get things done is to do it yourself, and we’re back where we started.

There has to be a better way.

There is. What we have to do is get away from exchanging time for money. In a regular job, or in the typical small business, what we do is work and get paid for the time. To get more returns, we have to work more – more hours, more effort. The problem is there are only so many hours available to do the work, and we end up degrading the quality of life in return for gaining a better income – we live to work, we should be working to live. The better way is to develop a passive income, a recurring income – in other words, keep getting paid over and over for work already done. There are many ways to achieve this, but all basically involve developing an asset which will keep earning an income – property that can be rented out, intellectual property that can be sold over and over, services that can be delivered automatically, and so on. We’ll discuss some of these in the next article.

This shows that your life goals must affect your business goals. Your fundamental decision is to consider what you want to get out of your tradesman business. Here are 6 possibilities for how you might plan your future:

• Do you want to work as a tradesman and make the best possible living from that? 
• Do you want to run a trade business and grow it by employing other people to actually do the work? 
• Do you want to use your business as a starting point, and perhaps move into property maintenance, property renovation, property development? 
• Do you want to support yourself working as a tradesman, to pay your way while you learn something completely new with a view to creating a different kind of business altogether?
• Do you want to support yourself working as a tradesman, and develop another sideline business that overlaps your trade? For instance, there are Multi-Level Marketing businesses which you could join where the products and services could complement your own services and which you could quite reasonably offer to your customers. There are very reputable MLM opportunities which could give you an income to overtake that from your full-time business in just a few years.
• Do you want to support yourself working as a tradesman, and develop another sideline business which is quite separate from your trade business? One example would be internet marketing, which you could work on out of normal business hours without impacting on your regular business.

There is no reason why you should not make decisions that can lead to a wealthy future. If you can work 40 hours as a tradesman and earn a certain amount per hour, then there is a limit to what you can earn through your trade business. If you grow your business by employing others to carry out your trade, or to expand into a related field, then you have the possibility of earning significantly more. If you add on other lines of business through MLM or internet marketing, then there is no limit to what you can earn with a passive income, eventually allowing you to give up the 40 hours and concentrate on living not just working.

The point is, what is meant by ‘need’ in this case?

• Is it what it would take to replace the salary you used to have in your job? Surely you need to aim higher than that, otherwise you are actually worse off because you would have the same money in your pocket but a lot more worries through having to run the business.
• Is it 10%, 20%, 30% more than the salary you used to have, so you can actually afford to pay the mortgage and car loan you already have? That would remove some of the old worries, at least.
• Is it enough so you can have a better house and car?
• Do you want private medical insurance, private schooling for the children, foreign holidays, diamonds for your wife?
• Or maybe you have elderly parents who need constant care.
• Perhaps you want to give much more to charity than you have been able to previously.

Now, in any legal trade enterprise it’s unlikely that you can go right to the max on the first day of business, so you should decide what are your targets in the short, medium and long term – that is, you need to set some GOALS.

This is worth taking seriously. You need to spend some time thinking about what you want to get out of life and writing it down. With each item you record, also put down a timescale for when you want to achieve it. Allow yourself short, medium and long-term goals. For instance, your short-term goals for your business might include finding your first customers, getting your first income, and so on. Remember this is not the same as making a plan – goals are about looking at the results you want to achieve, the plan is about how you are going to achieve them. When you first start looking at your goals, just write down everything you want to do, see, visit, drive, eat, drink. Don’t just say ‘I want to earn a million a year’ – say what it is that you are going to do with the money – real, concrete actions. This will help you focus on what you really want out of life and out of your business.

So you’ve had the training, got the qualifications, you really know your stuff. You can spot the faulty wiring, cure the central heating circulation failure, fix the sticky door lock, plaster the wall to perfection, hang wallpaper on the ceiling, whatever your particular skills for your trade. Then one day the time comes – maybe you disagree with the boss, maybe he ran out of work and let you go, or maybe you really always intended to do it yourself.

Now what? There are no customers in the toolbox. Where is your income going to come from? You have to find some customers, pretty quick –what is your plan for doing that? Have you had any training for doing that? You can’t get yourself in Yellow Pages at the drop of a hat, and even if you did, how many other people are offering the same services as you?

Before you get to this stage, you need a plan. If you are thinking about going into business on your own, even if you expect it to be some time away, you have to plan. Here are some things you have to think about:

1. How are you going to survive until the money starts coming in?
2. What will the startup costs be – your own equipment, transport, etc?
3. How much money do you need to make?
4. Where are you going to find your customers?
5. How are you going to convince them to use you rather than the next guy?
6. How much are you going to charge for your services?
7. If you have to provide materials to do the job, how will you cover the cost until you get paid?
8. How are you going to collect payment – cash in advance / on completion, 10 days payment against invoice?
9. Will you need a business bank account?
10. Will you need to register your business with the tax authorities?
11. Do you know how tax works – personal and business?

Once you are on your own, you are responsible for all of these. Even if you get some help and advice from the bank, the Chamber of Commerce, or whoever, it’s down to you in the end. You have to deal with these, which takes up your time – and that takes away from the time you can spend serving your customers, which reduces your income – so that’s another thing you have to take into account in your plan.

To summarise – if you think you will go independent in the future, start thinking right now what you need to learn before you make the jump. Start planning!

That is the essence of an internet-based information product business. Let’s see what you need to put together to build a business like this:

• The information product: you can turn your information into an ebook, an audio recording, or a video course.
• Promotion: a web site to describe the product to your target market. You can develop this yourself or get someone to do it for you very inexpensively.
• Sales mechanism: a form on your web site to collect the customer’s details and process the credit card payment – you can do this very simply using tools provided by PayPal and many similar companies.
• Delivery mechanism: ebooks, audio and video can all be delivered directly from the web site without having to physically ship any product – the customer can simply download the product to use on his own computer.

If you don’t have the technical skills to create the web site with the sales page and download page, don’t worry because you can very easily get someone to do that for you for very little money.

What about if you like the idea of this as a business for you, but you don’t feel you can produce an ebook, audio or video? Well, believe it or not you can get someone to do that part for you as well. You can commission writers to research and produce the product for you – just tell them what you want the product to be about, with some guidance about the angle you want to cover and the style you want to use, and you can get it done in a matter of weeks, again at very low cost.

Once your product and web site have been created, the business operates automatically – sales are made without you having to be present. You just need to promote your site so that potential customers will visit.

For a very low upfront cost, you can create an internet-based information product business that generates a passive income – a perfect example of the kind of asset we need to give us a life outside the rat race.

If your friend then recommends to one of his friends, and that results in a sale, it’s reasonable for him to get a commission. But if you hadn’t made the first recommendation, that second sale would not have been made, so it’s reasonable for you to get a small commission on that sale too. Small, because it was your friend who did the actual selling the second time, not you.

That is the essence of Multi-Level Marketing – your initial contacts buy product, then recruit their own contacts who go on to do the same. Because each person recruits several contacts, the people higher up the chain gain a network which grows without their direct management, making sales which they could not have made themselves. The large network, generating small commissions per sale, eventually overtakes the direct sales that one person can make – you have a large number of people each generating a small amount of income for you, and the growth of the network is out of your control.

This model is obviously open to enhancement. If you set about training your direct contacts and their recruits, and train them to train their recruits, then you can influence how well the whole network succeeds. Better training gives better results, and so better leaders get a better result – that is, a better income.

There are large numbers of companies marketing their products and services this way. Some of them are household names, in cosmetics, cleaning products, health products and so on. Others, even though hugely successful, you probably would not have heard of, precisely because their marketing model is to use only the MLM approach.

What do they gain by using this marketing model? For a start, they gain a sales network that is not salaried – income is earned purely as a result of sales. Secondly, in many cases, they require the recruits to make regular purchases of the product, either for their own consumption or for resale, giving them a monthly sales base.

If you think this sounds like those illegal pyramid schemes of old, there is a significant difference – in a pyramid, each level had to buy the product from the level above, each one adding their own margin to the price. In MLM, each level has access to the product at the same rates from the company, perhaps varying according to the quantity purchased, but certainly each having the same opportunity.

Building an MLM network is a perfect example of developing an asset which will eventually deliver passive income, requiring only your guidance and not your constant management.

What we did not cover was where these ‘options’ come from. If I buy a call option, I am agreeing with another party that I can choose to buy the corresponding shares from that party, at the agreed price, at any time up to the expiry date of the option. But, as in any deal, there are two sides to this trade. If I can buy the option from the other party, then he is selling the option to me. He can do this because he actually owns the corresponding shares, so he can supply the shares to me if I choose to exercise my option in the future.

Why would he do this? Well, if I am buying the option because I have an expectation that the price is going to rise above the agreed option price (the ‘strike price’), then you can see that his expectation must be the opposite – that the actual price will remain below the strike price, in which case I am not going to exercise my right to buy at the strike price. So what? So, I paid him for the right to buy at the strike price – if I don’t exercise my right to buy, then he simply pockets the price I paid for the option, and it is pure profit to him.

It’s a gamble for both sides – if the market price rises above the strike price, the buyer of the call option is in profit; if it doesn’t, the seller keeps the price paid for the option and he is in profit.

But look – this ‘other party’ is not some special magic kind of dealer – he is just someone who owns the shares on which he is offering to sell an option. If you have a portfolio of shares, there is nothing to stop you offering to sell call options on your shares. You get an immediate payment for the option, and either you simply keep it, or you have a guaranteed sale price for your shares.

As you might expect, there is a similar situation for put options – someone has to be selling the put options in order for you to be able to buy them.

As a further variation, and somewhat more risky, you can sell an option for shares you do not currently own. This gets you an income from the sale in the short term, but if you are on the losing side of the gamble then you have to go and buy the shares at the current market price.