Photo by stefanlacut.

If you’re selling a product or service online one thing you might choose to do is advertise it. One increasingly popular form of advertising is the 125 x 125 pixel (or small square) banner ad, usually displayed in a grid formation in blog sidebars. Their compact dimensions make them perfectly suited to this format.

In almost every case, advertising in this manner will cost money. In return, you’ll be hoping to get click-throughs, exposure, name recognition–and ultimately, more sales. In this post I’ll be explaining what makes an effective banner ad, and some common pitfalls to avoid.

Continue reading »

Photo by Payton Chung.

This is a guest-post by personal finance blogger Jim who writes at Blueprint For Financial Prosperity.

With all the talk of Social Security becoming insolvent and our retirements lasting into the 80s and 90s, there’s no question that proper retirement planning is crucial for everyone.

If you have an employer, you probably have some sort of defined contribution plan (401k, 403b) and, if you’re lucky, might even have a defined benefit plan (pension). If you’re a freelancer, or an aspiring freelancer, you don’t, and won’t, have access to either of those great plans.

So, what’s a freelancer to do? Luckily America was built on the backs of small business and there are plenty of retirement programs available. I’ll go through the major ones today so you get a good feel for them and are able to research them further. For the purposes of today’s discussion, we’ll assume that you’re a sole proprietorship or pass-through LLC entity.

Continue reading »

Photo by d70focus.

This is a guest post from Josh Garner, a practicing SEO professional. He’ll be sharing some of the things small business owners and the self-employed should be wary of when looking to hire an SEO.

As a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), my job is to make use of a number of methods in order to help a site rank higher in the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.).

I’ll save you some of the boring parts, but SEO is a pretty important aspect of any serious business venture with an online component. However, my business is also a pretty strange one. It requires a lot of experience, research, and patience to effectively get a website to rank highly. Because of this, a lot of what I do is still a mystery, even to clients I’ve had for over a year.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of “SEOs” out there taking advantage of the unknowing site owner, leaving a bad taste in their mouth about what SEO is and how it can help. With this post, I would like to give you a few signs that someone is trying to rip you off. These are seven signs of SEO scams.

Continue reading »

Photo by Rashuli.

The entrepreneurial promise of the web rarely lies in one big, undiscovered secret, which, when discovered, will re-invent your income and set you up for life. Instead, it’s located in the plethora of modest opportunities available — and your ability to combine them into a larger whole.

If I tried to make a living with the revenue generated by Anywired alone, I’d be eeking out an existence on around $125 a week. It’s only because I’ve tapped into four addition sources of income (editing Freelance Switch, freelancing, blog consulting and selling on eBay) that I’m able to earn a modest full-time income online while working significantly less than full-time hours.

One of the primary mistakes I see made by those hoping to earn a living online is that they focus all their efforts into one source of income, only to find that it yields modest results — results that are certainly not enough to live on. They assume this is because they’re doing something wrong, when in fact, most online income generation methods are very deliberately designed to yield modest results. The companies behind them want to get a lot of value for little pay-out. In other cases, results are suppressed because they have to be shared between a thousand other entrepreneurs trying to make money in the same way.

I’d suggest you reconsider pouring hours of work into making a single income stream perform better. Instead, think about how you could diversify and combine multiple income streams into an income river.

Continue reading »

Photo by Thiru Murugan

If you are — or would like to be — an entrepreneur, yet you’d be happy to earn enough to live the life you want rather than becoming filthy rich, lifestyle entrepreneurship might be a good fit for you.

Lifestyle entrepreneurs will generally base their ventures around time minimalism, or something they love, even if there are more profitable (but more time-consuming, or less interesting) options available.

The goal of a lifestyle entrepreneur is not to amass a huge fortune, but instead, to achieve certain definable goals and, beyond that point, to ensure business does not interfere too much with the enjoyment of those goals.

In this article, I’ll be outlining the primary steps to becoming a lifestyle entrepreneur, followed by 40+ educational and practical resources you can use to get started.

Continue reading »

Photo by Delgoff.

Here’s something you don’t hear often: audience growth should not always be the number one priority of your website, blog, or business.

If you’re earning an income through ads and affiliate programs, sure, grow like crazy.

But if you’re selling a product or service, a small audience may actually be the key to your success. In the beginning, at least.

Whether you’re selling an eBook, products, consulting or a newsletter, a loyal audience is far better than a large audience, and a trusting audience is far better than a big one.

A large and loyal audience is the holy grail of any online business, but it’s also the trickiest to achieve. If you thought rapid growth was tricky, try rapidly growing a loyal and trusting audience. Often, the methods you’ll use to increase one factor will damage the other.

Loyalty requires a sense of attention to the individual, approachability, and finely targeted content.

Continue reading »

Photo by fandayou_0088

This is not an article about earning your fortune on eBay — though I’m sure there are people out there doing just that. Instead, I want to talk about how casual eBay use can help declutter and add ‘lightness’ to your life while adding another modest online income stream to your network of rivers and lakes.

Starting an eBay account was something I always planned on doing ’some day’. I’d browsed their website and found the start-up instructions confusing. I could have puzzled them out (and eventually did), but I kept putting it off. All the while, a few semi-valuable things sat in my house gathering dust with disuse. I felt weighed down by them — weighed down by ’stuff’.

Over time, simplicity has become more important to me in life, not just in blogging and business. I finally decided to do everything necessary to convert my unimportant belongings into income, which could be used to ends that were more important to me. Even now I’ve only made a few hundred dollars on eBay, but the process of adding lightness to my life and converting the unimportant into the important has been surprisingly rewarding.

Continue reading »