Do you want to start a microbusiness with next to no startup costs?  Mark usually keeps his spare microbusiness ideas to himself, but I thought I'd throw this one out to the world since we don't have the skills to turn it into a reality (and we'd really like to take advantage of the service!)

Mark and I agree that we would pay at least $10 per month for an entertainment consultant service, someone who would read a questionnaire about our movie preferences and pick out movies for us to put on our Netflix queue.  Netflix does its best to suggest movies we'll like, but their formula is sad, sad, sad --- the program can't seem to understand that I rate a movie one star simply because I just can't stand Jim Carey and that Mark will watch absolutely any movie that revolves around time travel.

After that initial questionaire, the entertainment consultant would just have to delve into his mental data banks once or twice a week to pick out perfect movies for each client, then read email feedback to tweak his choices for next time.  I suspect that someone who enjoys all kinds of movies and is a good people-person could build up a clientele pretty quickly.

I hope someone will take Mark's idea and run with it...and then come back here and let me know how we can sign up.  That's how I calculate the quality of a microbusiness idea --- if the skinflint in me is willing to pay for it, I figure anyone in their right mind will too.

We were interviewed recently over on Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Weblog and I was quite pleased with the resulting post --- I always make more sense in an email than when speaking.  As part of the interview, I wrote:

Later, Mark told me that his parents didn't officially discourage him from inventing, but that their lack of encouragement amounted to the same thing.  When I asked him what they could have done differently, Mark jumped straight to the idea of giving him some capital to market his first invention.  At a few years older than seven, Mark built a basement flood detector that was clearly a worthwhile product --- he saw a similar concept being sold by a large business not too long thereafter.  Now he wishes his child self had $500 to $1,000 so that he could pay for a few ads in magazines, beating the big company to the punch.

Although I think that Mark's flood detector was a great idea, I tend to disagree with the approach of giving a kid capital.  From my limited experience with kids (I was one once...), it seems that handing over a wad of cash is no way to get the entrepreneurial wheels rolling.  Instead, could Mark's parents have helped him sell his first prototype for a profit, so that he could buy more parts and build more models?  Mark was already working at the time of his first invention, beating the pavement to sell subscriptions to a local newspaper.  How hard would it have been to carry his flood detector along with him and give those housewives the hard sell after pushing his paper?

In Microbusiness Independence, I admonish folks fleeing the rat race to start small, paying for supplies a few at a time even if you think you can save money in the long run by buying in bulk.  If your first experiment is a failure, you'll have to reenter the rat race if you sank your entire savings into the project.  On the other hand, if you only spent a couple of hundred bucks getting started, you can try out several ideas before you find one that really sticks.  By giving a child capital to market his or her invention, I think you would be doing that child a disservice by channeling him away from the microbusiness approach.

But as I said earlier, my experience with kids and businesses together is extremely limited.  So, I'm curious --- what do you think is the best way to encourage a budding entrepreneur?

You've probably read the stats --- over two-thirds of new businesses fail in the first year.  What the pessimists don't tell you is that the businesses that make it through the perilous period take off like a rocket in subsequent years.  Our chicken waterer business is now six months into its second year, and is showing a 400% increase from our first year profits.  (This is a big part of the reason why our blogging has been a bit slow lately.)

Part of the increased profit is simply due to a steep learning curve.  We were making it up as we went along last year, but this year we're putting all of the tips and tricks we compiled in Microbusiness Independence into play, with predictable results.

The other reason our business is doing so well this year is because the internet rewards people who keep active websites for long periods of time.  You can hire an SEO master, and Google will still look at you a little funny for the first six months.  Over time, more and more people will naturally link to the useful information on your website, and before long you'll get comments like I did this week in response to my note on a Livejournal community:

That just made my day.  I can tell you that I have absolutely never, ever been called a Rockstar before --- capital letter no less!

What do you do when your business is booming and you receive the first of an inevitable series of hate emails?  Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-Hour Work Week, spoke in Amsterdam about how to deal with negativity and criticism.  I've put a lot of thought into this myself since customer criticisms are my least favorite part of our chicken waterer business.  Although we receive ten times as many enthusiastic testimonials as angry gripes, the criticisms are all that remain my mind at the end of the day.

Ferriss makes the excellent point that "10% of people will find a way to take anything personally."  I'm starting to realize that there is a small subset of our customers who really need to vent their frustrations on someone, and sending a nasty email to a faceless company is an easy way to do that.  After a while, I began to notice signs that indicated folks who were uninterested in resolution and just needed to yell.  Customers not worth engaging further include people who think they deserve something special because they are a Navy Seal, an astronaut, or [fill in the blank with reason of your choice], and people who clearly didn't comprehend the explanation in my first reply and ask the same question again...and again.  My solution is a short, polite email that cuts the conversation short before it can become a pissing match.

"It doesn't matter how many people don't get it," noted Ferriss.  "What matters is how many people do."  Once you finish emailing back your most recent critic, remind yourself of the customers who wrote in to say that your product changed their lives.  Then go enjoy your own life, made possible by your version of Microbusiness Independence!

I'm constantly multi-tasking because my gut feels that the technique makes me more efficient.  Surely I'm saving time by burning CDs while writing a blog post, or by spending my morning going back and forth between laundry, weeding, and watering.  Right?

Most scientists would say, "Wrong!"  Psychiatrist Richard Hallowell describes multitasking as a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.”  Various scientific studies suggest that human multi-tasking results in lower efficiency rather than a time saving.  On the other hand, one recent study does show that our brains may be capable of focusing on two tasks at once, though not more.

After reading a bunch of scientific articles about multi-tasking, I've come to the conclusion that my typical daily schedule may not really be multi-tasking.  Generally, I'm sliding tasks with significant time lags together to create a cohesive whole rather than trying to do two chores at the same moment.  Doing laundry in the wringer washer has several periods of sustained activity with twenty minutes of wait in between.  Watering has an even longer lag period --- I set up the sprinkler, then let it run for an hour before moving on to another zone.  Weeding fits nicely into the laundry and watering gaps since it's a linear task that doesn't lose anything by being interrupted.  (In fact, I often cherish the breaks.)  When multi-tasking, I also try to make only one of the tasks brain intensive, interspersing a physical chore like pushing CDs into the drive with a mental workout like blogging.

Popular wisdom holds that women are better at multi-tasking than men, though scientific studies don't tend to back this supposition up.  Maybe women have figured out my method of multi-tasking without doing two brain-intensive things at once?  Until I see a study bemoaning the inefficiency of my type of multi-tasking, I'll continue to jump back and forth between tasks and will believe I'm getting a lot done.

I'm such a relentless early-bird that I didn't even realize today was tax day until just now.  I tend to file my tax return as soon as the last bits of paperwork trickle in from the bank, then get my refund while most people are still happily forgetting that taxes exist.  To those of you who aren't quite so obsessively early --- I hope your taxes are in and the ordeal is over.

While taxes are still fresh on your mind, you might want to check out this thought-provoking article about war taxes.  I really like the tone of the piece because it resonates with my feelings about the issue --- I don't like my taxes going toward war, but I do like the other things my money funds.  The article's conclusion is vote, vote, vote!  Good advice in any case, and a timely reminder that those taxes you are paying today are decided upon by you and your fellow citizens.

While researching his book,  The Richest Man in Town, W.  Randall Jones traveled to 100 American localities to talk to the richest man about the secrets of his success.  I don't know if the book is any good, but it formed the basis for an interesting article, "The Failures Club", which argued convincingly that every successful person rises from the ashes of a string of failures.

I suspect that many people don't even bother to start their own businesses since they've heard that 70% of small businesses fail in the first year.  One of the premises of Microbusiness Independence is that you need to prepare for failure, keeping your startup costs low so that you can bounce onto the next idea if your first shot doesn't pan out.  We've had several failures along the way, and we learned from each experience, coming closer to independence.

What was your biggest failure?  Did you learn anything from it?

One of the hardest decisions to make when trying start your own business is knowing when to pull the plug on a project that has hit its failure point.

A normal reaction to any failure is to feel discouraged and defeated. This is wrong on so many levels and if untreated can result in a toxic overload of despair.

A well documented failure can yield the kind of raw data that just can't be worked out on paper or a computer. Knowing a path is wrong helps to exclude that approach and guide you in a more finely tuned direction.

When we first moved to rural Virginia I made an attempt to revive a small video production business. The idea was to video tape local parades and sell DVD copies to the hundreds of parade goers that wanted to see their family and friends on that big day.

We got excited when the first check came in, but there was only one check after that, which didn't even cover our newspaper ad. Factor in the extra effort it took to drive to multiple parades and standing in the freezing cold with a video camera and you can see why we decided to call it quits.

That experience helped us to gauge the local market and prompted us to try a completely different approach to making money. I wouldn't want to count how many failures I've had over the years, but each one had it's own lesson, and if you can see the big picture you can understand how quitting something that doesn't work is not giving up but just shifting directions.

Photo credit goes to HowStuffWorks.com for the awesome parade picture.

The trouble with farming as a microbusiness is that you'll most likely end up earning less than minimum wage.  However, there is one crop that might pay enough to fit our microbusiness model.  No, not marijuana --- ginseng.

If you live in the eastern U.S., either up north or in the mountains, you might want to put in a patch of this wild herb as a long term source of revenue.  Seeds are pricy --- around $100 per pound --- and you won't be able to harvest the roots for six to twelve years.  But when you do, you'll likely see at least a ten times return on your investment.  Last year, I noticed that ginseng roots were going for as much as $600 per dry pound, which equates to about $2 per root.  If every one of the 7,000 seeds in your pound matured and sold at that rate, you would see a profit of $13,900.

Although you can plant ginseng in your garden, cultivation in tilled soil will result in lower quality roots.  Instead, find a north-facing slope covered with mature hardwoods like Sugar Maple, Beech, or Tulip-trees and plant the seeds directly into the forest soil in the fall.  First rake back the leaf litter, scatter the pre-stratified seeds, and then put the leaves back on top.  You'll see three-leafleted seedlings the first year, and the more familiar five-leafleted plants in later years.  After a few years, the plants will begin to bloom, at which point you can gather the seeds, stratify them by planting them in the ground for a year in a box of sand, then expand your patch.  You won't need to do any other work on your ginseng planting until the time comes to dig the roots.

If growing ginseng sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  In areas with high deer populations, you could see every one of your plants disappear down a deer's gullet unless you install a fence (or maybe one of our deer deterrents?)  Ginseng poachers are more likely to get your crop, though.  I put in a patch of ginseng five years ago, but when I went up to check on it last year, the soil was disturbed and the plants were gone.  I suspect one of my hunting neighbors stumbled across the patch and made out like a bandit.  (In the neighbor's defense, he probably didn't realize the herbs were planted or that I even knew what ginseng is.  "Senging" has been an Appalachian source of revenue for centuries.)

Despite the dangers, ginseng-growing might be a good retirement plan for some of you, especially if you live in an area where deer and 'seng hunters are less of a problem.  Wouldn't it be nice to have your retirement fund growing on the hillside behind the house instead of in a bank?

The conventional wisdom, outlined in The 4-Hour Workweek, is to outsource your paid labor to India.  I can't fault the economic logic since Timothy Feriss did his homework and discovered that you can pay an Indian worker chicken scratch and get astounding results in return.  However, I believe that it's worth a slightly lower profit margin to build a support network and community closer to home.  As a result, we make our chicken waterers ourselves, using parts from the family-owned hardware store down the road, then mail out our products from our small-town post office.  It's hard to become a real part of a rural community if you don't have family roots in the area, but putting our money into the local community has sped up our acceptance rate considerably.

Meanwhile, our business finally got big enough that it started to impinge on my garden time, so we decided to hire a helper.  Rather than looking to India for cheap labor, we instead realized that my mom needed some financial assistance and hired her as a part time employee.  Hiring Mom is a good deal all around --- we free up some time for homesteading tasks, Mom supplements her income, and we can write the whole thing off on our taxes.  Plus, there are slightly different employment rules for hiring family members compared to employing a random stranger --- we don't have to pay FUTA tax on wages paid to a parent, for example.

Granted, there are a lot of hoops to jump through when you hire an employee of any sort.  Business.gov has a very helpful page outlining the ten steps involved in hiring your first employee.  It looks really daunting, but the process isn't so bad if you have an afternoon to read up on the logistics involved.

Looking for more advice on how to run an ethical microbusiness?  Check out our ebook.

Once a year, I sit down with a calculator and file my taxes completely by hand.  Although I admit that for many people, hiring an accountant is a wise move during tax season, I get a lot out of being self-sufficient.  Before you run down to the local tax preparer's office, you might want to consider whether you wouldn't be better off filing your own taxes.

Now, I admit that the primary reason I prepare my own taxes is because I'm cheap and don't like hiring people to do things I can do just as well by myself.  My secondary reason is even less universal --- I really enjoy simple arithmetic and get a kick out of word problems.  And I am entirely aware that the IRS is vastly more likely to audit me since I run a small business and file my own taxes --- as a result, I never dodge around the rules and always document everything (good habits to get into anyway.)

Even if you don't consider math a fun way to pass a March afternoon, though, you will likely benefit from filing your own taxes at least once.  As I browsed through the 1040 instructions and the IRS website, I've discovered aspects of my business that I can write off which I hadn't even considered relevant.  For example, since my home is my primary place of business and I use about a tenth of it for business purposes, I can write off a tenth of my utilities and property taxes.  Not bad, eh?

On the other hand, filing my own taxes also makes me more aware of common truisms that don't quite make sense.  I've seen people buy expensive items for the reason that "I can write them off on my taxes!"  I don't think these people are entirely clear on the fact that writing something off on your taxes doesn't mean you get it for free.  When you write off that $10,000 truck, you're basically giving yourself a 16% to 30% discount on the purchase price (depending on your tax bracket.)  If you wouldn't have bought the truck if you saw it on sale for $7,000 or $8,000, then you didn't get a good deal.

What if you'd like to learn more about business-related writeoffs but aren't confident enough about your math skills to file your taxes completely on your own?  In that case, I recommend preparing your return to the best of your ability then bring it to an accountant to check over.  You might discover that you can save hundreds or thousands of dollars in the process.

Want more tips about running a small business that will pay the bills without taking over your life?  Check out our microbusiness ebook.

To be fair, though, most self-employed people who are complaining about taxes right now aren't savvy enough to realize that they're paying more than they would have been if they had a job.  Their complaints sound a lot more like the "Ow, ow, OW!" a kid might shout as he accidentally touches a stove burner.  In more adult terms, their complaints sound like, "But I already spent that money!"

My response to this widespread complaint is simple --- pay your estimated taxes once a month.  Although many microbusiness owners aren't required to pay estimated taxes throughout the year, especially if they are still working their day job, the federal goverment certainly doesn't mind.  To pay estimated taxes, just tally up how much tax you think you'll be responsible for next April, divide it by twelve, and log onto the federal goverment's EFTPS system to have the monthly amount removed from your bank account.  You can also pay quarterly, but I advocate paying once a month to minimize the ow factor.

By paying estimated taxes monthly, you're giving the goverment a free loan --- if you overpay like I did this year, you'll sigh a bit over the ten bucks you could have made by putting that money in a savings account.  But the peace of mind you gain from paying estimated taxes makes it all worthwhile.  Unlike my microbusiness peers, I look forward to tax time each year as it gives me a chance to play with arithmetic.  (Yes, I am a geek.)

Not sold on the merits of taxes yet?  Stay tuned for another installment in my anti-gripe series.  Meanwhile, check out Microbusiness Independence, the story of how my husband and I created a microbusiness and became financially independent with less than a thousand bucks in startup costs.

The microbusiness year, like the garden year, follows a sort of annual rhythm.  As March rolls in, I start to notice the signature feature of early spring on microbusiness owners' blogs --- griping about taxes.  Rather than ripping into these complainers on their own blogs, I feel obliged to mention my stance on taxes here...getting my annual anti-griping out of my system.

The anti-tax griping is a bit understandable since, as a self-employed person, you're suddenly responsible for giving more of your hard-earned money to the IRS.  If you've spent your life going in to work in the morning and collecting your paycheck every few weeks, you may not have realized that the taxes being deducted from your check aren't the only payroll taxes the government gets out of you.  You probably noticed that the federal taxes withheld from your paycheck are divided into two categories --- social security/medicare withholding and federal income tax withholding.  While you're working for the man, your employer matches the amount withheld from your paycheck for social security and medicare and sends that matching amount directly to the federal goverment.  When you become self-employed, you're responsible for paying both the part that's normally withheld from your check and the part your employer would pay, with the latter part now being known as your self-employment tax.

Although this "extra" tax feels a bit difficult the first time you pay it, you soon realize that it's only fair.  After all, you're now your own employer as well as your own employee, so you should have to pay both parts of the social security tax.  Despite all the griping, I never hear about microbusiness owners who willingly give back their monthly stipend and healthcare benefits once they retire.  Clearly, the social security safety net has a value we all appreciate, and folks just like to complain.

Want to read more about microbusiness topics?  Check out our microbusiness ebook.

I stumbled across Lionsgrip traction pads in a very surprising manner --- searching for information about chicken feed.  When googling for homemade chicken feed formulas, I kept ending up on a very useful site with several recipes.  Finally, I decided to poke around and see who had compiled all of this information about chicken feed, and I discovered that the information was just a small offshoot of a microbusiness website.

Lionsgrip actually has nothing to do with chickens --- they're a small company that produces mats you slip under your tires when your car gets stuck in the mud.  But the owners decided not to stop building their site after they added all of the obvious information about their product.  They went on to build six separate "guest websites", each chock full of useful information (and with two ads on every page sending you back to their traction pads.)

Lionsgrip's website is a great example of the SEO truism --- if you create good content, people will come.  Granted, Lionsgrip probably would have gotten more specific traffic if the content they built was more closely related to their product, but any useful content will attract potential customers to their site.

For other tips on free or cheap advertising, check out our microbusiness ebook.

By E. Sizemore

There are entire sections in most book stores these days dedicated to the “How to make money online” genre. I plan on writing a book about this topic myself within the next couple of years. Needless to say, we’re not going to cover the topic in any great detail from a single blog entry or article. But for those of you who just want an overview, what we are going for here is an introduction to the different ways you can make a living online.

Some people focus completely on one “way”. For instance, some people open up an eCommerce store and sell products. They don’t sell ads or do anything else. Some people have content websites that sell banner ads. They don’t join affiliate programs or sell their own products. Others, such as myself, mix and match the different monetization models depending on what is most appropriate for a particular website or topic. I will provide a link to one of my websites for each type of monetization model as an example.


#1 – eCommerce Store ( http://www.gaiam.com Where I work)

The first and most well-known online business is the “store”. eCommerce as a monetization model is one I’m sure everyone has heard of. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that the profit margin on most eCommerce products, once things like warehouse space, customer service, shipping… have been taken into account is often not much greater than the cut an affiliate marketer gets for doing a fraction of the work. We’ll get more into that later.

There are three ways to do eCommerce, generally speaking. First is to keep product in stock; second is to make the product on demand; and third is to have the manufacturer or distributor drop ship. They all have their pros and cons. The obvious downside of keeping products in stock is that you’re stuck with the bill if they don’t sell and it requires an upfront investment. If you run a microbusiness where you’ve created your own invention, like a chicken waterer, option two could be the way to go. The third option, drop shipping, is when you don’t keep the product in stock yourself. When an order comes in from your website you send the manufacturer or distributor the order and they ship it straight to your customer. Sometimes you can even get them to use your own shipping labels and packing slips with your logo. This is a good way to get started selling other people’s goods with minimal investment, but beware of the MANY drop shipping scams out there. We won’t get into that here, but let’s just say the best way to find drop shippers isn’t to Google “drop shippers” but rather to find a product you want to sell and call up the manufacturer or distributer on the phone and ask if they drop ship.

Any way you go about it, operating an eCommerce store is going to take a lot of time. You’ll be dealing with customers and vendors constantly. Imagine how many items get lost in the mail or arrive broken and need to be returned. Expect to spend a LOT of time on the phone talking to other people if you run an eCommerce business.


#2 – Affiliate Marketing (http://www.comparethebrands.com My affiliate site)

What if you could make money selling products online without having to deal with people? Personally, I don’t want to worry about customer service issues. I don’t want to deal with warehousing space, inventory management or logistics either. Let ALL of those eCommerce headaches be someone else’s problem and let me focus on what I do best, which is – sell stuff online. If this kind of situation sounds appealing to you then affiliate marketing might be the way to go. In this monetization model you get usually between 5% and 10% of the price for anything you sell by sending someone from your website to a merchant’s eCommerce website. Again, there are many great books about affiliate marketing and I’m not going to be able to teach you how to do this for a living in one post. But I can tell you where to start, which is A: signing up as an Associate on Amazon.com, and checking out major affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Share-a-Sale, Linkshare and Google’s affiliate network. Also, read as many affiliate marketing blogs as you can. Just don’t pay for any eBooks or programs. All of the information you’ll need is free if you know how to use Google. Here are a few posts I did on one of my websites (which is an affiliate and PPC website) a few years back:
http://www.firstpagefitness.com/make-money-with-these-fitness-affiliate-programs/
http://www.firstpagefitness.com/top-health-and-fitness-affiliate-marketing-programs/
http://www.firstpagefitness.com/water-for-life-affiliate-program-gets-even-better/


#3 – Lead Generation (http://www.usrecallnews.com My lead gen site for personal injury attorneys)

This is a more advanced form of affiliate marketing. Both traditional affiliate marketing and lead generation (lead gen) are what’s known as “pay-per-acquisition” or “performance based” marketing in which the business doesn’t have to pay you unless someone buys something, or signs up for something. In this case they are paying whenever someone signs up to be contacted, such as signing up for a newsletter or opening an account. Most lead gen. programs tend to be affiliated with topics like phone ringtones, real estate, online gambling, mortgages, pay-day loans and online education. In other words, competition is fierce. This is why I say it is a more advanced form of affiliate marketing. But the pay-outs are also higher and sometimes you can find a good niche for yourself.


#4 – Banner Advertising (http://www.livingoffgrid.org My content website with banner ads)

Unlike performance based marketing, publishers get paid for their banner ads even when they don’t make money for the advertiser. Whether or not someone clicks on the banner; whether or not someone buys something after clicking on the banner… it doesn’t matter. They are usually sold on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis, which means you have to have a LOT of traffic to make money with most banner advertising networks. However, you can privately approach merchants in your industry and offer banner ads for a monthly or annual cost regardless of impression count. They’ll usually want to see how much traffic your website gets.


#5 – Pay Per Click (ALL OF THE ABOVE websites also incorporate Google Adsense PPC ads)

There are two sides to the pay-per-click (PPC) coin. The first is that of the advertiser, in which they bid through programs like Google’s AdWords on keywords that trigger their ad to show up. They don’t pay unless someone clicks on the ad so they can get all of the “impressions” they want without the risks involved in banner advertising. At the same time, since they pay for the click and not the “conversion” or purchase, there is more of a risk here for merchants than with performance based affiliate advertising. Publishers (that’s you) use programs like Google’s AdSense to offer up advertising space on their websites. They only get paid when someone clicks on one of the ads, which could be in the form of links, banners and even video. One of the best things about this system is also one of the worst things: You don’t control which ads show up. This is good in a way because you don’t have to worry about finding advertisers. The system does it all for you based on the content (keywords) they find on your page. The downside is that sometimes ads will show up on your site that you don’t like. You can always log in to Google’s system and choose to block a certain advertiser, but sometimes it takes months before you notice. Generally speaking, however, I don’t find this to be a problem.


Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – What ALL Of These Methods Reqire

SEO is the process of working on code, content, links and other factors in order to achieve a better placement on search engines like Google, Bing and yahoo!. You can buy your way into the sponsored ads on search engines (usually the ones that show up on the side) but the main results are referred to as “organic” and you have to work to get shown there. I am an SEO Consultant. It is what I do for a living so I have a big advantage in this regard. But anyone can learn the basics of SEO. It isn’t rocket science. It all boils down to basic elements like:

• Make sure your website is crawlable (eg no flash navigation or flash content, text should be text, not text embedded inside images, no fancy javascript navigations…)
• Make sure your content matches what you want to be found for (eg don’t write about blue widgets if you’re hoping for people to find you on Google for green thingamobobs)
• Make sure your meta title and meta description match what you want to be found for, which also matches the content on the page.
• Make sure good, quality websites link into your website. When possible, the link should be on a topically-related website and the hyperlink text should match what your title, meta description and page content says your website should be ranked for.
• Make sure you have unique, quality content that was written for your website and not shared with a bunch of other websites.

In other words: ALL YOUR DUCKS SHOULD BE IN A ROW. If your website is about green thingamabobs and that’s what you hope people will find you for on Google, you should have “Green Thingamabobs” in your Meta Title, in your meta description, in your page content, and in links that come into your website from other websites about “thingamabobs”. Again, entire books have been written about SEO. Entire books have been written about specific pieces of the SEO process, such as search-friendly copywriting. There are week-long conferences in cities across the nation dedicated to this topic. I have devoted the last five years of my life to perfecting the art and science of ranking highly on search engines like Google. You will not learn it overnight, nor can I tell you all about it in an article. But now you know enough to get started on your own research. Here are few resources to take you a step further:

• Find out what people are searching for: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• Learn more about SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/blog
• Join an SEO forum: http://www.seobook.com/ (just sit back and read for awhile before joining discussions or asking question. You’ll find most of your questions have already been asked and answered by previous visitors.)
• Read lots of SEO blogs: http://www.toprankblog.com/search-marketing-blogs/

Everett Sizemore has been involved in SEO as an e-commerce business owner, marketing agency employee, independent SEO consultant and as an in-house SEO manager. Of these situations, Everett finds his in-house position as the SEO manager for an e-commerce brand to be the most challenging and rewarding. Everett works for Gaiam, Inc. and blogs about e-commerce SEO on his website http://www.esizemore.com. He speaks about in-house SEO at direct marketing conferences and has guest lectured at the University of Denver on Internet marketing topics, including SEO.

We do spend money advertising our chicken waterers, but whenever possible we snap up chances of getting free exposure.  As we discuss in our microbusiness ebook, probably the best method of free advertising is writing a press release for a national magazine.  Our microbusiness really took off after we were the subject of a writeup in Backyard Poultry Magazine --- nearly a year later, orders still trickle in from magazine readers who stumble across the article.

Another great option is to be interviewed for a podcast or radio show.  A friend of ours, Everett Sizemore, makes a large chunk of his income from ad revenue on his websites.  He was recently interviewed by American Freedom Radio, and the show went out over the internet and aired on 18 AM stations across the U.S.  His show is worth a listen for those of you who might want to follow in his footsteps.  Notice how he clearly went into the interview with the mission of sending folks back to his website, so he made sure that the radio personality got his URLs right and repeated them a few times.

If you're stressed out by the idea of having your voice broadcast on national radio, take a few minutes to write down your main talking points.  Then consider the kinds of questions the interviewer may ask and write up some potential answers.  Practice on your spouse or your dog so that your talking points feel natural on your tongue.  Then go for it!  The great thing about free advertising is that you have nothing to lose.

Still stuck on what your microbusiness product should be?  I checked Handy farm and home devices and how to make them out of the library last week, flipped through the book for an hour, and saw at least half a dozen ideas that could be turned into great microbusines products.

Many people seem to get derailed at the inventing stage of their microbusiness career, but I sincerely believe that you don't need to be an inventor to start a microbusiness.  During our current economic downturn, many people are striving to return to a simpler way of life, which opens a whole world of opportunities for the entrepreneur.  Why not look through your grandparents' attic for outdated devices from a previous era?  The world might just be ready for them again!

For other tips on starting your microbusiness and quitting your job, check out our ebook.

I recently read The One-Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka and thoroughly enjoyed this glimpse into the life of one of the founding fathers of permaculture.  Although I got the most out of this Japanese farmer's do-nothing farming technique, I was also struck by a throwaway paragraph in which he described an invention he failed to market:

As it often does, my microbusiness antenna perked right up.  Fukuoka's invention sounds like the perfect microbusiness product --- a niche product serving a real purpose that is relatively cheap to manufacture.  If Fukuoka had been inventing in the age of the internet, he could easily have followed our microbusiness plan to turn his seeding tool into the source of a bit of funding for his research.

The pedal-powered rotating drum thresher that Fukuoka mentions in the text would have made another great microbusiness product (and still might!)  These threshers have been in use in Asia for quite a while, but small-scale grain growing is very unusual in the U.S. at this time.  If we had an easy way to process the grain, might backyard gardeners and homesteaders start to grow our own wheat and barley?  I suspect that construction of the pedal-powered thresher would make the subject of a lucrative ebook.

As soon as I saw it, the Trake struck me as a perfect microbusiness product.  It's elegant and fun to use, solves a real problem (now I only have to bring one tool along while weeding rather than two), and is definitely unique.  Unfortunately, the Trake isn't a microbusiness product.  Instead, when you go looking for it on the web, the modified trowel pops up on dozens of online stores.

Information about the inventor is also absent, which leads me to assume that whoever invented the trake sold the idea to a big company.  If he had instead marketed the trake on his own website, I'll bet the resulting microbusiness would have paid all of his bills while only requiring him to work a day or two per week.  I wonder if the inventor figures that the cash he got for selling the idea was worth the lack of long term income.

For more tips on starting a microbusiness that pays all of your bills in one day a week, check out our ebook.

Our first atempt at starting a microbusiness was a learning opportunity.  We decided to sell some of the native plants on our 58 acre farm on Ebay, figuring that all it would cost us would be a few seller's fees and a bit of postage.  We made a bit of money --- which was much appreciated at the time --- but in retrospect, we should have run the microbusiness very differently.

The problem with Ebay from a microbusiness perspective is that buyers expect to get a really good deal, so you need to undercut all of your competitors to make a sale.  We had to drop our prices to rock bottom, meaning that we were barely making minimum wage on the time we spent packaging plants and taking them to the post office.  Added onto that was the buyers' mentality --- after spending a mere $2 on a plant, they were pissed off if it arrived wilted.

In retrospect, we should have sold our plants through our own website and spent money on advertising (and search engine optimization) to bring customers to us.  Then we should have found a way to make our products more unique in some way.  But we learned a lot from the experience, and our next microbusiness product went much better!

To read more about our experience developing our microbusiness, check out our ebook.

The Chopper 1 ax is another great example of a microbusiness product.  Bob Kolonia invented this firewood splitting ax in 1975, then went the old school route of obtaining a patent and selling thousands of axes per day through major retailers like K-Mart.

Reading between the lines on his website, I assume that Bob started to burn out somewhere in the midst of this marketing frenzy.  I'm not surprised --- trying to make a living by retailing your invention through other people's big box stores is nearly always bad for the little guy.  You end up putting in a lot of time and getting very little money back on each item sold.  In 1989, Bob decided to quit while he was ahead.

But people kept contacting Bob and asking for more Chopper axes.  Luckily, during the intervening years, the internet had exploded.  Bob can now easily sell his axes on his own website for a good profit rather than making pennies on the dollar through a big box store.  His niche product is now a microbusiness sucess story.

We found our Chopper 1 ax at a yard sale, and the primary woodsplitter in our family now swears by its use.  My only complaint is that Bob succumbed to the current trend of charging an arm and a leg for shipping.  We had to order some replacement springs from his website --- worth every penny of the $6 --- but were shocked to see $10.56 shipping added to that price.  We got a bit annoyed when the springs came in an envelope with less than a dollar's worth of stamps in the corner. 

My advice to microbusiness owners is to always minimize the shipping add-on costs.  Getting "free" shipping leaves customers with a much better taste in their mouths (even though the price is added onto the up-front cost) than getting socked with a big shipping and handling fee.

For more tips on starting your own microbusiness and quitting your job, check out our ebook.

I was flipping through Mother Earth News one day when an ad caught my eye.  "Eliminate the need for toilet paper!" it shouted, and I sat up and took notice.  The pStyle is a little plastic cup/funnel which fits between your legs (women only, but guys obviously don't need one) and lets you pee standing up.  All types of women buy them --- from the outdoorsy type who don't want to bare their buttocks behind a tree to the folks who are terrified of sitting on germy gas station toilet seats.

The pStyle is the perfect fit for the type of microbusiness I advocate in Microbusiness Independence.  It's definitely a unique, niche product, so even though the funnels probably cost only pennies to produce, Krista has no problem selling them for $12 apiece. 

Like our chicken waterer, Krista didn't invent the pStyle on her own.  When I emailed her last year, she 'fessed up and told me that a similar product has been in use in Europe for a couple of decades --- she just brought it to the U.S.  If you get stuck trying to come up with an invention to build your microbusiness around, remember the pStyle and take heart!

Beginning bloggers often start out by using blogging services like Livejournal or Blogger.  These sites make it easy to run a personal blog without learning many new skills, but they quickly lose their utility when it comes to blogging to increase your business site's search engine rankings.  When you blog on someone else's website, you're working to increase their internet capital, not your own.  It's also harder to set up these external blogs so that they mesh well with your own business website, meaning that folks who randomly turn up on your Livejournal blog are much less likely to realize that you're selling a product and then to become a customer.  If you want to put ads on your blog and make money directly from the blog, most blogging services won't work for you.

My solution to these problems is to blog on my own website using ikiwiki.  People who don't have a Linux geek as a big brother may decide to use Wordpress or MoveableType as their blogging platform instead.  Either way, you may beat your head against the wall a few times setting it up, but soon you'll be blogging on your own site and accruing all kinds of internet capital.  Plus, you won't have to worry about a blogging service selling your personal information or crashing and losing all of your blog entries.  Nor will you have to pay extra to post photos and to format your page.  Blogging on your own site is a win-win.

Interested in other ways to cheaply expand your business's internet presence?  Check out our microbusiness ebook.

Last time, I posted about how a blog is a great search engine optimation tool.  But what's the key to a successful blog?

First of all, it's worth thinking about whether you have what it takes to be a good blogger.  Successful bloggers love to write and are passionate about their topic.  They're in it for the long haul and aren't going to post everything they have to say in a week or two and then forget about their blog for a month at a time.

The personal element is also important since this is what keeps a lot of readers coming back for more.  If you're intensely private and unwilling to share any elements of your personal life, your readers won't feel as vested in your story and may stop reading after a while.

Good content is also key.  Our homestead blog is successful because we chronicle the trial and error process we use to run our farm.  Folks who read our blog get tips about how to repeat our successes and avoid our failures.  New readers who run across our blog entries while searching for a diy topic on the internet often become regulars or link to our blog from their website, increasing our blog's internet capital.

Pictures also go a long way in the blogosphere.  That's actually one of my struggles on this blog --- how to spice up all of the things I have to say with relevant pictures.  On the other hand, our chicken waterer blog has no problem with images since our girls are always photogenic.

Of course, the great thing about the internet is that even if you give blogging a shot and don't have what it takes, the process won't do your business any harm.  All it cost was a little of your time, and you might have learned something in the process.  Check out our ebook for more tips for starting a small business cheaply.

Lots of people try to trick the system using search engine optimization, but it's nearly as easy to get to the top of the search engines organically.  My advice is to find out which part of the internet you love and make a presence for yourself.  If you're like us and love to blog, then make sure you post a blog entry every day.  Or maybe you'd rather hang out on Facebook, tweet your way to significance, or shoot the bull on forums.  As long as your online presence is visibly linked to your business website, every time you make a post or a tweet, you're making your business site more important and netting more customers.

We attribute quite a bit of our microbusiness success to our incessant blogging.  Our homestead blog gave our business a jumpstart --- rather than starting as an insignificant website tucked away in a dark corner of the internet, our business was attached to a well-read and loquacious blog.  Although only a limited number of people read the blog itself, by adding a little note at the end of each of our personal blog entries with a link to our business website, we quickly pushed our business website to the top of the search engine rankings.  The same effect is easy to achieve by, for example, putting a link to your website in your forum signature and posting up a storm on a well-read forum.

So find a part of the internet you enjoy and get out there!  Think of search engine optimization as running for political office.  No one's going to vote for you if you don't put in your time kissing babies.

The Apple Grower by Michael Phillips documents two men's journey toward making a living on an organic apple orchard.  At the time of the book's writing, the author and his partner had been running their orchard for five years and had made their way to a lofty hourly wage of $3.50.

Okay, so their endeavor is clearly a labor of love funded in part by their wives' full time jobs.  In fact, the book read like a cautionary tale, a reminder that even though we love growing things, agriculture is far from the best way to make a buck.

Still, the fact that their small orchard is even breaking even is quite a coup in this day and age.  I ascribe their moderate success to:

• Value-added products.  A large proportion of apples grown organically are never going to look pretty enough to be sold to the general public as is.  If turned into fresh and hard cider, jelly, apple butter, and vinegar, though, those low value (but tasty!) fruits turn into top dollar products.
• Attracting tourists.  Their operation is built around an old timey, water powered cider mill.  Tourists show up just to see the structure, then end up buying apples and cider.
• Mail order.  The most beautiful apples and the highest value products are sold through a mail order catalog.  The book doesn't mention a website, but that would be my inclination as a way to save on printing costs and attract an even wider audience.  In either case, the idea is valid --- sell high value products to a larger customer base and you can charge more realistic prices.

In my opinion, the orchard has two major problems preventing it from becoming a profitable microbusiness.  First, organic apples aren't really a niche product --- you can even buy some of the most boring varieties in the grocery store.  Second, apples are heavy so shipping costs probably deter many buyers.

Still, if you're dreaming of an agricultural microbusiness, The Apple Grower is a good book to pick up.  If you'd like more tips on starting a profitable microbusiness of any sort, check out our ebook about starting your own business and quitting your job.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some pointers for building your business with an email list.  At the same time, I sent out an email to all of our own past customers, telling them about a holiday sale.  In the business, this type of list would be known as a warm list --- clearly, all of the folks on it had bought our chicken waterers at one time, but some of them hadn't visited our website in a full year.

What were the results?  0.3% of the people asked to be removed from our list, 1% of the people had questions about use of our product, and 1.5% of the people came to our website to make another purchase.  These numbers are pretty normal for email lists, where the return rate (percentage of people who visit your site afterwards and make a purchase) is usually between 0.3% and 1%.

Although those return rates sound pretty low, keep in mind that sending out an email to your past customers costs you nothing except a bit of time.  Check out our ebook for more tips about advertising your business for free.

When we submitted Microbusiness Independence to Google Books, I was ready to wait a month or two to see my information live.  Imagine my surprise to check back a week later and see our book in place!

At the moment, our book's title is misspelled, but I have high hopes that will be fixed with a little patience.  Otherwise, I have to say that the uploading process was astonishingly easy and quick.

Of course, I'll have to wait and see whether listing our book on Google sends us more customers.  As usual, I'll keep you informed!

Meanwhile, feel free to check out our ebook for information about creating your own job.

Putting your products on sale seems like an anti-intuitive method to make more money, but it can actually work.  Our chicken waterers tend to hit a sluggish period as the weather cools, at which point we stop advertising and settle in for a restful winter.  This year, we decided to see if we could boost our winter profit with a 10% off sale combined with an email to our past customers.

The sale definitely helped increase our conversion rate.  The week before the sale began, we had a 2% conversion rate (meaning that 2% of the people who dropped by our website bought a waterer.)  The first week of our sale, our conversion rate jumped to 3% --- a 50% increase!  Of course, we made a little less money per waterer sold during the sale period, but even with that factored in our gross sales increased by 35%.

Check out our small business ebook for other hints on free and cheap methods of increasing your sales.

I'm always interested in seeing how other microbusiness owners making a living under their own volition.  One of my early role models was Herrick Kimball, creator of the Whizbang Chicken Plucker (among other farm-related inventions.)

To me, Herrick's microbusiness is a sure success because I've seen his product in use in multiple households.  It's cool, it works, and it even has a perfect name.  I like his idea of selling do-it-yourself guides in addition to physical products, too.

Herrick uses the same model we do to come up with ideas --- rather than reinventing the wheel, he bases his inventions on old timey tools or on modern gadgets in use by big businesses but unknown to the small farmer.  Clearly, you don't have to come up with your own idea to create a niche product; you just need to know a good product when you see one.

Perhaps Herrick's strongest microbusiness asset is his love of blogging.  His posts drives readers to his Whizbang business and make his products turn up higher in web searches.  Everybody who loves to blog should have a microbusiness since every blog post gives you more power in the cyber-world.

Despite all of the things that Herrick did right, as our own microbusiness grew, I started critiquing his microbusiness.  I subscribed to his blog and was surprised to discover that he still works full time in a factory job that he hates.  Rule 1 of our microbusiness path to financial independence is to make enough money so that you can stop doing anything you hate to do.  By those standards, Herrick's microbusiness is not a success yet.  (I suspect that Herrick makes just as much money from his microbusiness as we do from ours, but he has several kids and probably isn't as tied to frugality.)

I also wonder whether Herrick might not make more money if he started selling ebooks rather than sinking his capital into physical books.  Rule 2 of Microbusiness Independence is to keep your startup capital as low as possible so that you can quit your job quickly and really start living.  That said, I find very little else to complain about in Herrick's business.

I hope you're inspired to try your own hand at starting a microbusiness.  Check out our $4 ebook about starting a business for lots of tips that will help you quit your job twice as fast.

I'll be the first to tell you that we made a slew of mistakes during our first year in business.  One of our worst was struggling with branding. 

We started selling our automatic chicken waterer from a page on our blog just because our blog was our main internet presence at the time.  Within six months, I realized my mistake.  People looking for "chicken waterer" or "Avian Aqua Miser" were much less likely to click on a search engine result that talked about homesteading than one focused solely on chickens.  We finally got our business its own domain name, but then we had to redo all of our search engine optimization to get folks to start showing up on the totally new site, which meant our sales plummeted for a month or two.

We also sent out waterers for the first few months without a label or logo anywhere on them.  We figured everyone knew we were a small mom and pop business and would appreciate us not adding fancy packaging that raised their price.  I quickly learned that Americans like fancy packaging at any price --- a couple of our customers complained about the homemade nature of our waterers.  So we came up with some fancy labels to stick on the waterers and used the same logo on our instruction sheet.  Adding the URL to the labels also helped us gain more repeat customers who might otherwise forget where they'd gone to buy their waterer.

If I had to do it all over again, I'd give my product its own website from the get-go.  I'd also make up a logo and plaster that everywhere, building brand name recognition and preventing complaints of our product looking too homemade.  It turns out that branding should be one of the first steps in selling a product, not one of the last!

Check out more lessons learned in our microbusiness ebook.

Like social networking sites, email lists are a great way to keep your customers involved in your business and to gain repeat customers.  I've run several email lists over the years and have come up with a few pointers:

• Keep your emails relatively infrequent.  Many customers will enjoy (or at least put up with) emails that come out once every two weeks, but when you start emailing more than once a week they get cranky.
• Keep your emails short, sweet, and to the point.  A great way to do this is to give tidbits of news, then include links to your website for the full story.
• Keep your emails relevant.  Resist the urge to email your customers about your birthday and your friend's new business.
• Each email should be a call to action.  At the least, you want your readers to keep you in mind and wander back to your website.  Do you also want them to take advantage of a limited time sale or vote in an online poll?
• Use the blind carbon copy (Bcc) function to hide everyone's email address so that no one can reply to the whole list or steal those emails.
• Always include a simple way to unsubscribe.
  

Check out our $4 ebook for more free ways to advertise your business.

I've been visiting a lot of blogs today, checking out the competition as I start to promote my work at home ebook.  I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised to see that most folks suggest what amounts to signing up with big companies and getting paid as an online salesman.  Do people really not realize that shortcuts like that trickle some cash down to the little guy, but the person who gets rich is the owner of the big company?

I believe that the best way to make a living by working at home is to develop a niche product and start your own microbusiness.  My method isn't as fast --- you probably won't make a profit in the first month --- but once you do start making money, every penny goes into your own pocket.  Building a solid foundation really pays off in the long run since you can kick back and slow down after a few months and let your microbusiness nearly run itself.  I hope that more people will take the slow but sure route to independence rather than taking that shortcut into the swamp.

Although many people are currently clinging by their fingernails to their jobs, I think that now is a great time to quit.  Why?  Because while having a steady paycheck may feel safe, the only way to be truly secure is to work for yourself.  It's more lucrative, exhilarating, and fun too!

But where do you start?  I think that the first step is talk it over with your family and figure out exactly where your priorities lie.  Then sit down with a calculator and figure out how much money you need to make ends meet (and to meet your other goals.)

Once you know exactly what your goals are, it's not too hard to come up with a niche produce and market it online.  Check out our microbusiness ebook for more information on how to start a home business.  The first chapter is available for free download --- I hope it inspires you to take the plunge!

There are several ways to sell an ebook, some easier and cheaper than others.  Unfortunately, the cheap ways tend to require a bit more effort.  Since I'm a firm believer in keeping costs extremely low so that we can sell our ebooks for just a few dollars apiece, I'm working out the kinks in our ebook delivery system.

The cheapest way to sell an ebook online is to add Paypal "buy it now" buttons to your website, the way we have with our work from home ebook page.  Paypal takes payment information from your customers, then deposits them on a page where they can download your ebook.  Of course, Paypal does take their typical cut of the action, but you don't have to pay an additional service to send the ebook to your customers, and your customers also don't have to wait on you to email them a copy of the book.

Unfortunately, the link back to the download page after customers make their payment on Paypal is not as obvious as it could be.  I've added the screenshot shown here to our store page in hopes it'll help our customers figure out where to click.  If this doesn't do the trick, I may have to come up with a more complicated solution --- customers (very rightly) get cranky when they can't download their ebooks immediately.

The exhilerating launch of our home business ebook is now in progress.  I was a little bit worried that no one would be interested in our ebook, but have been thrilled at the response.  Thanks to everyone who took the plunge and bought the book just from seeing it linked on our homestead blog!  I guess now we can start sharing it with the world.