In my previous post - Laid-off Professionals: Discover Your Lifetime Goldmines, I talked about the several goldmines that the laid-off professionals might possess but do not know how to fully utilize them. In this post, I will highlight some of the ways that you can use to convert them into life-time goldmines which might become your next satisfying career.

Blog
Thanks to the information technologies, you are now given many new and various platforms of finding new career opportunity at the comfort of your home and the blog is one of them. Blog has become very popular these days as it allows you to share and showcase your knowledge, skills and expertise to the public easily. If you are not aware what is a blog, check out the video here.

The blog is generally used to share passion, hobby, knowledge, experience and solutions to problems so there are many specific blogs created for specific topics. The blog is a convenient platform to attract customers; easy to set up and cost little compared to a physical shop or office – it is also like a virtual shop and a knowledge sharing center. Blog has interactive interfaces which allow you to connect with your visitors easily and it also has comment features that allow visitors to leave comments and interact with one another.

This is an efficient platform that you can utilize to generate life-time goldmines by sharing your insights, experiences, common problems and solutions faced in your profession. Format them into interesting and inviting content then put it on the blog. The main benefit of the blog is it will help to draw visitors from all over the world which may eventually become your loyal fan. This will not only help to raise your profile but also build your reputation as a thought leader. You can then leverage your reputation and expertise to become a paid consultant or coach.

Affiliate Maketing
Once you have a blog with an inviting content, you can further monetize it with affiliate marketing. If you want to find out what is affiliate marketing, check out the successful internet entrepreneur Joel Comm’s video on its definition.

This is an excellent way of getting life-time goldmines because it does not require huge investment in inventory, customer services, logistics or billing to sell product or service at your side. How the affiliate marketing works is that you just find some relevant products or services from the affiliate merchants that would complement your blog’s content then refer them to your visitors. If any of your visitors bought any products or signed up for any services, you will get commissions from the merchants. It is probably one of the easiest and safest ways to find your life-time goldmine when compared to other methods.

Information Product
Information or digital product has become a highly popular product in this information age; this is a good news for you as you have a wealth of knowledge, skills and expertise to share. You can now convert them into highly desired information or digital products that people demand such as an eBook, how-to guide, tutorials, home-study course, online course or continuity programs. This is by far the most popular and new way of earning in the new information age.

Creating an information or digital product may take considerable times but it is definitely worth the effort and times as it will give you the long-term income just like earning royalty from a book.

Online Video Training Course
Similar to information or digital product, online video training course has become another great way to market your expertise. It is considered more effective than a normal eBook because of its multimedia elements. People generally learn faster and better though multimedia elements such as animation, images, audio and video as it engages all senses while learning. Furthermore, reading static information product like an eBook on the computer can cause eyes strain so using video as an online training course is a preferred choice by many people now.

Online Membership Site
To achieve life-time goldmine, you have to have life-time recurring income and one of the best ways of achieving it is through building an online membership site. You can build an online membership site based on the knowledge, skill and expertise you already know and offer continual membership subscription to your blog visitors. It can be a monthly or yearly subscription but in order to make your members stay forever, you have to ensure constant stream of new contents from your membership site.

Packaging the online video training course into the membership site can be a good idea. You can break the course down into several modules and let your members choose to learn at their paces. Once you have established a reasonable base of members, you can add in a discussion forum so that members have a venue to discuss what they have learnt and exchanged ideas. If the discussion forum can grow into a active online community, it can become your another goldmine as it helps to generate content, feedback and ideas for your future training courses.

---

The above are some of the ways that you can use to convert your skills, knowledge and expertise into life-time goldmines. You can use the above methods individually or combine them together to achieve your objectives. I hope the above will also give you an idea that a new career opportunity can be created without the need for another job hunting. Now you already know the methods of achieving it, the next step will be knowing the exact steps of achieving it.

As each of the methods is quite a specialized topic; I will discuss each of them in details in future posts so remember to check back for more.

For those of you who are new to starting a home-based online business, you’ll be concerned about the amount of times, efforts and costs required to start your home-based business. You worry that at the end of the day, the result may not justify all the hard works. While there is no silver bullet for making a profitable home-based online business but there is one business model which is also my favorite will take away most of your worries, risks and obstacles. This business model is known as affiliate marketing business model and it is probably the fastest and safest way to start a home-based business online.

Why Affiliate Marketing Business Model?

1. Save the Operation Costs and Hassles

If I tell you that you can just start a business without any product or service? You do not need to be involved in any singles of business operations – from manufacturing the product to finding the right distribution channel. Best of all, you can totally avoid the nasty customers and forget about the customer services. Do you believe it? Yes, it is possible in affiliate marketing business model because you are selecting a fantastic business model where everything is handled by the merchants. All you have to do is pick the right market and the product you are passionate about; promote them actively to customers then drive them to merchants’ websites to make the purchase. You will be rewarded handsomely if you could drive more sales to their websites.

2. Low Cost for Startup

Cost is the number one concern of starting a home-based online business. The good news is you do not need a big capital to start up as most affiliate programs are free to join. As long as you have a PC or laptop with internet connection; you are ready for business.

3. No Risk Involved
   There is no risk involved in affiliate marketing business model simply because you are not involved in any of the business operations except promoting the merchants’ product or services. The only risk I could see is probably the advertising and promotion costs if you spent your money on paid advertising. However, you have the choice not to go for paid advertising as there are many other ways to promote the affiliate products and services.
4. Your 24×7 Cash Generating Machine
   If you set up your affiliate marketing business model and promotion right, it can become your powerful cash generating machine as it runs 24×7 non-stop everyday to earn you money online. You will not need to trade time for money and give you the freedom to enjoy long holidays or break. There will be no customers bugging at you or vendors calling you, you are totally at ease and carefree; you will really appreciate this when you fall sick. Could you recall how often you could get a peaceful rest during your medical leave?
5. Fastest Result
   Compared to other business models, affiliate marketing could you give you the fastest result and return due to the time, money and effort saved for business startup. However, affiliate marketing also relies heavily on your promoting and marketing skills to succeed. Therefore, it is good to invest in some education or training, I would highly recommend you read up “The Super Affiliate Handbook” from Rosalind Gardner, it is a must read for new affiliate marketers and aspiring home business owner. You can learn how an ordinary woman like her without much computer knowledge could make $50,000+ per year just by selling other people’s products.

Having known the major benefits of affiliate marketing business model, it can be only beneficial to you if you could try it out yourself. I will be covering more on how to incorporate affiliate marketing business model into your home business in future posts so check back for more.

Many people dread the ideas of starting a business at home because of the instability and unpredictability of income. Majority prefer to keep their day jobs even though they are unhappy and disappointed with their jobs. The only reason is a guaranteed pay check is paid every month regardless rain or shine.

This is the most common misconception of starting a home business. It is, however, no longer true if you choose your home business model carefully such as affiliate marketing business model. It is probably the safest and fastest way of building home business online without the hassles of keeping inventory, billing, shipping and customer services. It allows you the total freedom of working anywhere and anytime.

Besides the benefits mentioned, the most powerful part about affiliate marketing is its ability to give you long-term and recurring income just like your day job. Most importantly, you only require to put in one-time effort of attracting customers to sign up. Once the customers sign up, you will be paid lifetime commission as long as the referred customers continuing using the merchant services. This is definitely an ideal option because you would not need to spend endless hours and efforts to continue promoting the affiliate products.

But beware not all affiliate programs in the market provide such commission structure, you must check carefully before signing up. A good place to start is MoneyToplist.com; it is an online directory which listed all the affiliate programs that provide residual and lifetime commission. These types of affiliate programs will not only pay you the first sales commission but as long as the customers who continue using the merchants’ services, you will be paid. That is how you can achieve long-term and recurring income for your home business.

How to Select a Recurring Income Affiliate Program?
Generally, the commission for recurring income affiliate programs is quite low compared to those who give one-time commission. It ranges from 5%-15% while the one-time commission can pay as high as 60%. Personally, I prefer performance-based commission, meaning the rate of commission pay to you will increase based on the overall sales volume you can refer. For example, one of the email marketing company offer their affiliate commission based on the following structure.

• Level 3  =  $250/monthly revenue earns you 15% revenue share
• Level 2  = $250 – $5000/monthly revenue earns you a 30% revenue share
• Level 1 = $5000+/monthly revenue earns you a 40% revenue share

I find this is an excellent motivator as affiliates will be motivated to work hard to get more sign up. It also act as a marvelous guide as affiliates can work out in advance how much they need to work on to get the desired income every month.

Where to find Recurring Income Affiliate Programs?
Besides the MoneyToplist.com mentioned above, the most direct and fastest way of finding recurring income affiliate program is going through the affiliate networks. Some of them include Commission Junction, Clickbank, LinkShare and ShareASale, they are good places to start. All these different affiliate networks will give you different categories and various types of products to choose from.

Besides the affiliate networks, there are other independent affiliate programs available in the market but not listed anywhere. You can do a search in Google and approach the affiliate manager directly. If you can prove to them you can be their good promoter, they have no reason to reject you.

What are the Most Popular Recurring Income Affiliate Programs?
The most popular recurring income affiliate programs come mainly from software subscription services or digital products. For example, website hosting services, email marketing services, traffic analytics services, keyword research services, search engine optimization services and ecommerce hosting services. Digital products include home-study courses, video courses, how-to eBook and membership training courses are equally popular.

---

It is not easy to find the right recurring income affiliate program to promote. Nevertheless, it is still worth the effort because of the great reward it provides you at the end.

I hope you can see that it is possible to build a recurring and long-term income at the comfort of your home. A stable and predictable income does not necessary has to come from a day job.

If you think otherwise, please leave your comments below.