Internet Business4u: How to make money online

Books have the power to change lives. We live in a time when books are more affordable and accessible. Yet, fewer entrepreneurs read books, using the excuse of a lack of time. If you can’t find time to read, you as an entrepreneur will not grow, which will have an effect on your business.

If you study any successful entrepreneur, you’ll see one of the keys to their success is that they educate themselves through books. You can get books these days for as little as .99 cents. Many are even free through Amazon’s KDP Select program. There’s no reason not to have a Kindle full of books that can educate you and teach you strategies to grow your business.

Here are six books that can help you create a business and life you love. This list is a good start. It’s up to you to research books that will help you and your business where you are in your journey. These books are changing lives and helping entrepreneurs grow their business.

1. Just Blow it Up: Firepower for Living an Unlimited Life.

Dixie Gillaspie is an author, coach, speaker and fire starter. She is also a contributor here at Entrepreneur. Her mission and this book are all about breaking through the barriers that typically hold entrepreneurs back from growth in their business and life. Your mindset is one of the most important parts of your business because what you think affects the action you take. Just Blow it Up helps you identify mindset traps and gives you a practical strategy to beat them. This is the definitive guide to climbing over those mental walls.

2. MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom.

Tony Robbins is a pioneer in the personal development space, but his book on finances is like a graduate course in college. A novice in finance could read this book and walk away an expert. Tony takes complicated financial strategies and distills them down to the average reader’s level.

Money is not everything in life, but it is important, especially in the business. There are many entrepreneurs who are great at making income, but are clueless as to how to make their money work for them through investing. You started your business to create freedom, Tony’s book can help you take that freedom to a level you didn’t think was possible through the right investment strategies.

3. 48 Days to the Work You Love.

If you are a frequent Entrepreneur reader, Dan Miller’s book will speak to you, especially if you’re stuck in a day job. What comes through the most in this book is how unique and genuinely an entrepreneur is Dan Miller. Dan is an entrepreneur who refuses to accept what society and the media have conditioned us to believe about our dreams and entrepreneurship. He lays out an actionable plan to transition out of a day job into a business and life you love. Read the book with caution because you will walk away changed. I read this book in hours. I couldn't out it down.

4. Business in Blue Jeans.

Susan Baroncini-Moe has written the playbook for creating a business that’s everything you’ve wanted it to be. Susan starts off dealing with the mindset traps and moves to the strategies that will help your business see explosive growth. She teaches you how to build a business you love on your terms. Entrepreneurship has changed. Today, you can run a multi-million dollar business from anywhere in the world. Susan teaches you how. I read this book on an eight-hour bus ride from London to Paris, I couldn't sleep because the book had me speechless.

5. The Dip.

You know this list wouldn’t be complete without a Seth Godin book. Seth has a way with words and knows how to cut through the fluff. The Dip is a book about knowing when to quit or move on. The book deals with mindset struggles and offers a plan to overcome them. It’s a short read that should be on every entrepreneur's book list.

6. The Fire Path.

Kate Erickson wrote this book about leading podcaster John Lee Dumas. John and Kate have built the Entrepreneur on Fire podcast to a six-figure a month business. The book lays out a practical plan you can use to grow a business using the untapped medium of podcasting.

Make time every day and week to read an excellent book. Many of the most successful entrepreneurs read a book a week. Knowledge is power and the key to growth. Add these books to your list; they can help you create a business and life you love.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246068

Let’s say you’re a newbie to the world of online sales and are looking to make money online, but you’re starting with a small startup budget. With the blinding wealth of information available for new business owners, knowing how to spend your limited funds can be a bit intimidating.

Here is a five-step checklist to help get you started and guide you toward success.

1. Spend time getting feedback on what you’re selling before launching.

Don’t rely on affirmation from friends and family to validate that you have a unique and salable product or service. Chances are, these people are emotionally attached to you, and they’re more likely to think every idea you share is the greatest thing since Nutella. Getting feedback from people who are emotionally attached to you is a “disaster from the start,” says Adam Callinan, founder of BottleKeeper.

Get market validation from potential customers who aren’t in your social circle. Some entrepreneurs use the “will they pull out their wallet” test before investing money in a business. Callinan, who’d come up with a prototype for an individual beer bottle cooler, ran a crowdfunding campaign on Fundable to gauge pre-orders for his product. His campaign raised nearly $14,000, 280 percent of his $5,000 goal.

Besides Fundable, there are a number of crowdfunding platforms to choose from including Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Rockethub.

Other ways to get people’s feedback, says Sujan Patel, vice-president of Marketing at When I Work, is using customer insight survey tools, such as Qualaroo and Client Heartbeat. If you’re just starting out, surveys are a chance to find out what the customer is hoping the product/service will solve or do for him or her. If you’re already in business, surveys can ask how the customer found out about the product or service, whether the customer is willing to be a return customer and why.

Or if you’re in a job in the industry you plan on starting a business in,get feedback from the people at your job -- your manager and clients -- says Steve Tobak, founder of Invisor Consulting.

2. Have a website.

You must have a website, says Joel Widmer, founder of Fluxe Digital Marketing. Not only for the obvious -- to have something to refer customers back to -- but having a website builds your brand’s digital footprint. Keep your site simple and copy-driven with opportunities for email captures on every page.

Three easy steps to having your own website to sell products without spending a lot of cash are:

Select a content management system (CMS), such as WordPress, which is popular for its user friendliness and is free.
Register a domain name and subscribe to a hosting service, such as GoDaddy or Bluehost.
Customize your CMS with ecommerce-enabling plugins and themes. WooCommerce offers free ecommerce themes for WordPress, such as Storefront. Also, WP eCommerce andMarketPress are additional free ecommerce plugin options.
Or for anyone setting up an e-commerce site, both Shopify andSquarespace are easy e-commerce platforms that allow you to build an e-commerce site yourself.

Related: How to Make Money As An Expert

3. Know your competition and customers.

Study up on both competitor and complementary brands (i.e. if you are selling a fire alarm, then look for “house safety” websites). Widmer says your customers will be hanging out on websites for both competitor and complementary brands. He recommends using search tools such asSimilarWeb and Google’s related-search results (located at the bottom of every Google search) to see what sites your prospective customer may be visiting.

Other free research tools to get to know your market, suggests Brandon Schaefer, CEO of MyVirtualSalesForce, are LinkedIn (to see who competitor brands are connecting with and what types of updates they're posting), Google Alerts (for brand mentions and keywords) andGoogle Trends.

4. Create an action plan for sales and marketing.

To earn your first million in sales, says Patel, work backwards and put a number on what it takes in monthly revenue to get to a million your first year -- meaning how many units, subscriptions or services must be sold. Create benchmarks to reach. Even if you don’t reach them, you have a blueprint.

One way to reach your goal is to figure out which marketing avenues to leverage. Given the wealth of social-media possibilities, start with one or two social-media outlets where you know your audience is. In general, for new products the best channels are Facebook and Pinterest, says Widmer. For expertise and services, try LinkedIn.

Also, two effective and free marketing strategies are blogging on your own site and guest blogging on complementary sites. This strategy helps build content and a digital footprint for your brand, says Widmer. For guidance on what hot topics to blog about, Buzzsumo, a free web service, allows you to input any domain or topic and get a list of the 10 most popular related posts at the moment. It can also inform you of what popular sites to hit up for guest blogging.

Should you guest blog, use the opportunity to lead users back to your site and capture emails, says Widmer. One way to do so is to use a “call to action” -- where you offer the reader something of value, such as a free how-to eBook or a must-have checklist -- that the user can get or download by going back to your website and providing an email address.

Some other marketing tools? The free KingSumo app allows you to capture email subscribers through giveaways; Facebook Ads start at $1; and the e-newsletter tool MailChimp has a free option and is drag-and-drop easy.

5. Do as much yourself as you can.

The DIY mentality will usually save you money if your budget is limited. Also, it allows you to control the process and brand, explains Callinan, who built his ecommerce site from scratch by talking to others who’d already done ecommerce sites successfully. Don't farm out jobs you can do yourself, especially in the beginning.

If you need on-demand expertise from entrepreneurs with a track record, try Clarity, says Widmer. The service allows the user to get specific, consultant-level advice for a fee.

All startups are a gamble -- but as Patel advises, whose company will hit $10 million in revenue this year, “Hone in on where your strengths are and double down.”

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/247919