It’s life or death for them.

They must get new customers and profits… or they’re out of business.

And this is a great opportunity for you to make money in this recession.

If you can help your local businesses increase their profits, you can earn a pretty good income as a consultant.

If this sounds good to you, I highly recommend you check out the Startup Rebel Consulting Business Blueprint.

You’ll learn the fastest way to make money as a consultant – without cold calling, advertising, conducting seminars or begging for referrals.

And get this… you don’t need any experience, website, traffic or mailing list.

Now, I speak from experience as I’ve been a consultant since 2001.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• How to secure clients quickly without cold calling, advertising, conducting seminars or begging for referrals.
• My unfair advantage over well-established and experienced consultants.
• How to charge premium fees and have your clients love you for it.
• How to get paid upfront before delivering your services.
• How to outsource your services so that you can earn passive income.

And here’s the best part… I’m giving the course away!

I could easily charge $97 for this course but I want to help people who really need the cash during these difficult times.

Now, I know some people associate “free” with low quality. But that is NOT the case here.

This is a complete course. It’s a comprehensive step-by-step guide to starting your own profitable consulting business.

So, I highly recommend that you check it out now. Click here to get it.

The merchant would handle the product development, fulfillment, payment processing and customer support. All you have to do is just send visitors to their website.

However, with so many affiliate programs out there, choosing a great program can be a challenge.

So here are five elements to look for when choosing an affiliate program:

1. Conversion rate

The first and most important element in an affiliate program is the conversion rate. You need to know how successful is the merchant’s sales page in converting visitors to customers.

This metric is critical especially if you’re advertising the affiliate product. You must be able to calculate whether you’ll be profitable with your advertising campaign.

2. Commission

Affiliate commissions can range from 5% to 100%. But the best programs offer recurring monthly commissions.

Instead of just getting commission for a single sale, you can earn monthly passive income from a program with recurring commissions.

3. Promotional tools

A good program should provide lots of tools and more importantly, the merchant should have tested the tools before offering them to their affiliates.

You don’t want to waste time and money with unproven and untested tools.

4. Tracking

Some programs only track sales for up to a month. If your referral buys after 30 days, you won’t get credit for the sale.

So, look for programs that offer extended tracking, e.g. 1 to 5 years. Be sure to read their tracking policy before you sign up.

5. Minimum payment

Many programs have a minimum payment policy. For instance, you may have to earn at least $50 in commissions before you get paid.

I prefer programs that don’t have any minimum payment policy. Nowadays, with Paypal, a merchant can pay their affiliates every month instantly and easily without incurring any expensive bank charges.

And that’s it. Five elements to look for when choosing an affiliate program.

By the way, we have just launched our own Startup Rebel Affiliate Program. If you want to earn monthly recurring commissions from our flagship product, the Startup Rebel Alliance, do check it out here.

Wall Street had the biggest plunge in history last week.

Banks are going bankrupt.

Hundreds of thousands of people are jobless.

You know what? This is actually great news.

The recession represents the best opportunity for anyone who wants to start or grow their business. Here are three reasons why:

1. Cheap labor.

Now, you can get highly qualified people to help you build your business. Since many of them are out of work, they will be willing to work for you on a freelance basis.

During the good times, it’s virtually impossible to hire them. But now, you can even get MBA graduates, if you know where to look. Hint: LinkedIn.com

2. Cheap advertising

During recessions, many companies cut back on their advertising expenditure. And that means less competition for premium spots in Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing.

And if you’re smart, you can negotiate with high traffic portals that rely on advertising revenues. During the dotcom boom, these websites were charging $30 per thousand views for banner ads.

Then, the bubble burst. And their rates dropped to below $5. So, if you want inexpensive banner ad rates, now is the best time to grab them.

3. Publicity opportunities

Since the ailing economy is the biggest topic in the media right now, use it as a hook to generate free publicity for your business.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say you’re in the crafts market. Write a press release on how people can generate a side income by selling their crafts on eBay.

Then, send it to every crafts and women’s magazine in the country. If your press release gets picked up, it will generate thousands of new visitors to your site.

And that’s it. Three damn good reasons for starting and growing a business in a recession.

Most people don’t know this but many of the most successful companies in the world like HP, Sony, Microsoft and Dell all started during recessions.

And because they could survive during the bad times, it’s no surprise that they grew by leaps and bounds during the good times.

So, just ignore the media because they are in the business of sensationalizing stories. They have to in order to sell advertising.

This is your chance to build a business that lasts. Strike while the iron is hot!

But the problem is most people dread writing. I know I do.

You have no idea how much effort is required just to write a 30-page ebook like the Startup Rebel Adsense Blueprint. (If you’re wondering what is the Adsense Blueprint, click here to find out.)

So, in this article, I’m going to discuss the six ways you can write ebooks quickly and easily.

1. Record your seminar

Here’s a neat way to get paid to write your ebook: Organize and conduct a seminar.

It can be a live seminar or a teleseminar. Your clients will pay a fee to attend the seminar and then, you record the entire seminar in video or audio format.

Then, send the files to a transcriptionist. In a week or so, you’ll have the first draft of your ebook ready. All you need to do now is to edit and proofread it.

2. Record your interview

If you don’t like public speaking, another way is to get someone to interview you. Record the entire interview and get it transcribed.

3. Edit and sell public domain books

There are many published books with lapsed copyright. The work belongs to the public now, hence the term “public domain.”

And that means you can edit and sell the books without having to pay royalty to the original writer.

4. Hire a ghostwriter

If you don’t have any expertise on the topic that your market wants, you can hire a ghostwriter. A ghostwriter is someone who will research the topic and write the ebook for you. You’ll own the rights to the ebook forever and get credit for the work.

There’s nothing unethical about this. Many celebrities use ghostwriters to write their memoirs or biography. So, this is an option that you should consider if you don’t have any marketable expertise.

5. Interview experts

Another way to leverage other people’s expertise is to interview experts. Many experts will agree to an interview if the benefits are attractive to them.

You can offer them publicity and exposure for their products and services in return for their time. So, be sure to craft an irresistible offer before you approach experts for interviews.

6. Acquire resell rights or private label rights

You can also obtain the resell rights or private label rights to ebooks. Resell rights allow you can sell the ebook and keep all the profits but you can’t edit or claim ownership of the work.

On the other hand, private label rights allow you to edit and sell the ebook with your name on it.

To look for resell rights or private label rights ebooks, just do a search on Google.

And there you have it. Six quick and easy ways to write your ebook.

Since how-to ebooks are extremely lucrative, the market is also extremely competitive. So, you need a competitive edge before you start writing and selling your ebook or you’ll get whacked by your competitors with bigger marketing budgets.

If you want to learn how to compete for traffic with businesses that have bigger marketing budgets and larger affiliate base, do check out the Startup Rebel Competitive Magic course.

Even with a small budget, you can succeed in any highly crowded market using the strategies in the course.

It’s how-to ebooks.

People are starving for information. They want an instruction manual on how to do just about everything in life. They want to learn how to:

• get a job
• get a date
• start a business
• dance like professional
• sell on eBay
• play Texas Hold ‘Em
• lose weight

The how-to book market is so lucrative that one book publisher built a million dollar franchise book series. You may have heard of it.

It’s called the “Dummies” books.

There are other similar book series too and most of them are doing quite well. “The Everything” series, “Idiot’s Guide” series and others are all cashing in on the how-to phenomenon.

You could cash in by creating your own ebooks on any or all of the subjects covered in any of those series.

Here’s an effective way to determine whether your ebook idea is marketable. Just visit www.dummies.com and check out their list of titles.

If you can find a Dummies book on the topic of your choice, there’s a market for it.

Specific Information Sells

Ebooks, due to their brevity and are marketed primarily online, can target smaller audiences. You don’t have to write a universal book like “How to use a computer.”

Ebooks can cover more specific topics. In other words, you can create ebooks for different markets on the same subject and sell each one separately.

Say you’ve decided to write an ebook on fishing. You could publish separate ebooks on “How to Catch Freshwater Trout,” “How to Tie Your Own Flies,” or “How to Plan a Successful Deep Sea Fishing Trip.”

Almost anything related to the hobby can become a separate ebook depending on how much detail you include.

Ebook Titles Are Critical

The title of your ebook is extremely important to its sales. The title of your ebook doesn’t have to be incredibly clever.

Just include the words “How to” as part of the title and the rest should tell people exactly what the ebook is about.

For example, which of these three titles is the most effective?

1. “How to have a successful garage sale.”
2. “One weekend away from a cleaner house”
3. “How to sell your old shoes for a profit”

Although titles #2 and #3 are clever, a little punchy and correspond with the ebook content, I would still recommend using title #1.

“How to have a successful garage sale” sums it up pretty well and will catch the eye of an Internet surfer who is interested in putting together a garage sale and needs a how-to manual.

So, how-to ebooks are proven sellers and can be a great way to supplement your online profits.

Most internet entrepreneurs are small thinkers.

Just visit a few internet business-related forums and you’ll notice that most entrepreneurs are satisfied with a financial goal of $50,000 to $100,000 a year.

Or check out the numerous products sold to internet entrepreneurs. Most of them appeal to people who want a 6-figure income.

Now to most people, maybe even you, that may seem like a lot of money.

But here’s the problem…

It’s very difficult to build a long-term sustainable business in any competitive market when you set your financial goals so low.

In other words, it’s hard to remain competitive by staying small. A business must continue to grow to remain competitive.

So when you say you’re happy with $50,000 to $100,000 a year, you’re putting an artificial ceiling to your business and this will impede your growth.

Here are two reasons why staying small makes no business sense:

1. Inflation

Most entrepreneurs ignore the fact that they are part of a macroeconomic environment. The cost of goods and services increases annually. The increase in expenses (e.g. advertising, freelancers’ fees, employee salaries, rent, etc) affects your business.

Depending on where you live, the inflation rate could be 3% to over 10%. So, if your income stays at $100,000 per annum, you’re losing money every year to inflation.

$100,000 today may be worth only $80,000 in 10 years time!

2. Competition

Nowadays, internet businesses are so cheap and easy to start that every Tom, Dick and Harry are getting into the act. So, whatever profitable niche you’re in right now will become highly crowded and competitive.

You’ll face more difficulty in getting high rankings in search engines, keeping pay-per-click ad costs low and recruiting affiliates to promote your products. You’ll also have to compete for star employees and freelancers.

Time To Adjust Your Mindset

Now that you know staying small doesn’t make any business sense, what can you do about it?

Well, the first thing you’ve got to do is to change your mindset. From now on, you’ve got to think big.

You must set at least 7-figure goals. You must think international and not just local or national. You must develop and implement big ideas.

And here are four reasons why thinking big will pay off for you:

1. You already have all the resources required to build a million dollar business.

The amount of time and money required to build a 6-figure business is exactly the same as a 7-figure business.

For example, Michael Dell started his computer business which is now worth billions of dollars for only $1000. And Michael, just like you, has only 24 hours a day.

So, if you have $1000 and 24 hours a day just like Michael Dell, why not build a multi-million dollar business?

2. It’s more profitable.

Whether your income goal is $100,000 or $1 million a year, the odds are really against you in achieving them. You may only hit 50% of your target.

Here’s how thinking big helps…

If you achieve 50% of a $100,000 a year goal, it’s $50,000. But if you achieve only 10% of a $1 million a year goal, it’s $100,000.

Therefore, even if you only achieve 10% of your big goal, it’s better than 50% of your small goal. Thinking big is simply more profitable.

3. It’s easier to secure capital.

Your business may need capital injection in the future to stay afloat or to grow. Guess what? It’s easier to secure a $1 million investment than a $10,000 bank loan.

I know it sounds completely counterintuitive but it’s true. Investors are attracted to big ideas and businesses that can grow big very quickly. A 6-figure business just doesn’t appeal to them.

4. It’s easier to attract star employees.

Star employees, like investors, are attracted to big ideas. That’s why companies like Google and Facebook attract highly talented and experienced professionals.

A business that wants to stay small doesn’t appeal to them. Stars want challenges. They want a career, not a job. They want growth, not stagnation.

So, if you want to build a long-term sustainable business, start thinking big and stop thinking small. And you’ll see the impact it has on your business once you change your mindset.

“But I can’t compete against established companies with big budgets!”

Yes, you can!

Let me share a little secret with you…

I used to work for a public-listed company that had a $2 million marketing budget. They were one of the top 3 biggest advertisers in their market.

Yet, with such a huge budget, they were making a number of mistakes that smaller competitors can exploit.

But the funny thing is… no one did!

All the smaller competitors thought it was impossible to compete head on with this company.

And that brings us to the my next point.

Every business has weaknesses. No business is perfect. Not even Microsoft or Google.

The key to competing with bigger competitors is to dissect their entire business and look for cracks.

Once you’ve found them, pry them open and you will win market share from them.

If you want to learn how to dissect your competition, do check out the Startup Rebel Competitive Magic course…

http://www.startuprebel.com/magic.html

I will teach you how to analyze your competition so that you can exploit their weaknesses… even if they’re more established and have bigger marketing budgets.

In the course, I’ll also show you 74 strategies you can use to crush your competition in any highly crowded market. So, check it out now…

http://www.startuprebel.com/magic.html

Here is a list of important terms, their common abbreviations and meanings:

Terms of Service (TOS). All participants in the Adsense program are required to abide by Google’s Terms of Service. This is basically the “rule book” for Adsense. Anyone who fails to conduct themselves according to the TOS may be banned from participation and/or have their account suspended. You should read the TOS carefully.

Publisher. That’s you. Anyone operating a site displaying Adsense ads is considered a publisher.

Pay per click (PPC). Google Adsense operates predominantly on a pay per click basis. That means the advertiser pays for each time someone clicks on their ad. It also means that you will get paid for every click.

Click through rate (CTR). This represents the percentage of page impressions that result in a click on an ad at your site. For instance, if your blog gets 100 impressions and 17 of them result in a click, the CTR for your site is 17%.

Ad unit. An ad unit is a displayed block of Google Adsense ads. There are a variety of ad units from which to choose. They are usually expressed in terms of their size in pixels. For instance, a 120 x 600 tower ad unit will be 120 units wide and 600 units long – tall and skinny.

Ad placement. This refers to the location of your ads on your site. You may place Adsense units anywhere on a page consistent with the TOS. There are a variety of online guides, charts and recommendations demonstrating the various location options and how successful they tend to be in producing a high CTR on the Adsense program site.

Channel. You can set up channels to track the performance of individual Adsense ad units or to track earnings on particular sites. You can establish your channels in the “Set Up” area of your Adsense account.

Competitive Ad Filter. Google gives you the option to block certain advertisements via the competitive ad filter. This allows you to avoid inadvertently advertising your competition.

The world of Adsense brings with it a new vocabulary that you must master in order to achieve maximum success. Terms like those above become second nature in a short period of time for most Adsense publishers. By knowing and understanding those terms, you can understand your performance charts better and also pick up all the latest Adsense strategies faster.

You agree to display contextual advertising served up from Google on your site. In exchange, Google will pay you for every visitor who clicks on the ads. Your blog becomes the online equivalent of a billboard and you are paid for getting cars to drive down your street to see it.

There are a few factors to optimizing Adsense profits.

One factor is getting traffic to your site. In order to get paid, you need to get clicks. In order to get clicks, you need to get visitors. Thus, many bloggers pay a great deal of attention to developing multiple traffic streams.

Another factor is choosing a profitable topic that attracts many advertisers. Some topics have more advertisers than others. So, it’s imperative that you choose a topic in  a market that offers many products and services.

These are essential aspects of the process but they are not the sum total of the Adsense game. There is another, often overlooked aspect to the process that is critical in experiencing real success: Ad placement.

Let’s say you have a blog that consistently gets 1,000 visitors a day. Let’s say that your topic serves up advertising that earns you, on average, ten cents a click. If every visitor were to click an ad, your blog would generate a whopping $100 a day.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen. Many visitors won’t click on an ad at all. In fact, most will not.

If you discuss Adsense with bloggers who weren’t able to make the program pay, you will hear a consistent complain: “I put up the ads but no one was clicking on them. I didn’t make much money at all.” These bloggers abandoned Adsense, believing it is impossible to make a profit.

Their failures could be related to any number of factors.

• Their traffic may have been poorly targeted.
• The ads may not have been relevant.
• Their blog content may have been of poor quality.
• The blog itself may have been unattractive and uninviting.

But it could also be a matter of ad placement. The location of the ads on the blog plays a major role in profit generation.

One blogger, who operates a fan blog about a popular television celebrity, was excited to find his blog had taken off. He was suddenly landing as many as 500 visitors almost every day.

Although the Adsense ads on his site were only paying about seven cents each, he felt good about the fact he was making an average of seventy cents per day on a site that required little maintenance or effort.

Ten people were clicking an ad every day, for a 2% click through rate. And that translated to nearly $250 per year – well in excess of the cost associated with running the site.

One day, the same blogger decided to give his blog a facelift. He tweaked the design and in the process, he moved his Adsense ad blocks to different locations. A few days later, he checked his numbers and was absolutely shocked.

His blog had gone from making seventy cents a day to making seven dollars a day. The click through rate had shot up to twenty percent almost overnight. The difference, testing later proved, was completely based upon changing the location of the ads. That $250 per year blog was now on track to generate over $2,500 per year.

The moral of the story is quite simple: Traffic is important but ad placement cannot be overlooked. The results in our example may not be typical but the story is true and it demonstrates the difference that can be realized when Adsense is optimally placed.

If you have a blog that produces a nice stream of traffic and are looking for alternatives to Adsense, you may want to consider some of the following options:

Adgenta (http://www.adgenta.com/)

Adgenta is a keyword-based advertising program that allows publishers to insert ads into their blog. Every time an ad is clicked, the blogger is paid a flat rate of 15 cents. While Adsense determines which ads to display based on its own assessment of your page’s content, Adgenta allows you to choose which keywords you would like it to use in choosing advertisements.

This can be a great solution for boggers who have pages that fail to serve up relevant Adsense ads or for those who tend to get only very low paying ads.

Adgenta’s interface is simple and sign up is free. The ads are inserted into your site using simple HTML blocks and the ads are actually linked graphics, unlike the more complicated script used by Adsense.

Yahoo Publisher Network (YSN) (http://publisher.yahoo.com/)

YPN is Yahoo’s version of Adsense and preliminary reports indicate that it may be a profitable solution for bloogers who are unable to use Adsense. The Yahoo system is very similar to Adsense. So, Adsense publishers should be able to utilize the program easily.

Although still in its infancy, the program is backed by a major player, which lends it a greater degree of long-term reliability. Unfortunately, the YPN project is still in beta and you must apply for or receive an invitation to participate.

Ad Networks

Instead of relying on a pay-per-click model, you may want to sell advertising space on your blogs. You can sell directly to advertisers or through the use of an ad brokerage.

If you have a blog that receives a significant number of well-targeted visitors, selling advertising space can be a great alternative to the Adsense model.

Other Options To Consider

• Chikita mini-malls (Chitika.com)
• Text link programs (Adbrite.com)
• MSN ContentAds (coming soon)

As you can see, even if Adsense doesn’t work for your blog or you cannot use Adsense, there are other options available. Adsense may be the biggest game in town but it certainly is not the only one.

Free blog providers can be a great way to introduce yourself to blogging and to learn a little bit about the process. However, they are a poor choice if you’re hoping to generate significant blogging profits. There are simply too many pitfalls associated with their use.

1. Advertising revenue

Firstly, many free blogs hamstring your ability to utilize one of the most effective ways of generating a profit via blogging, Adsense. Some free blog providers offer the free blog and server space in exchange for the right to display their own Adsense ads.

The terms of service directly prohibit you from displaying any additional contextual advertising. This is how the free services generate their revenue and the prohibition makes perfect sense. However, it takes the most powerful revenue stream away from you.

2. Control

Second, whenever you use a free service, you lack control over your site. This is not simply a matter of advertising or content restrictions. The lack of control is far more serious.

Blogger.com, for instance, is known to regularly freeze and/or delete blogs outright for unexplained reasons. Those blogs simply disappear and a great deal of work vanishes with them. Other lesser-known services may be undercapitalized or lack profitability and may simply go under – taking the blogs right down the drain with them.

3. Credibility

Third, there is the issue of credibility. Whether it’s right or wrong, surfers tend to bestow a greater degree of credibility to (and are thus more likely to visit) sites that have their own URLs. A blog that is an obvious sub domain at a free host can make potential visitors and customers wary of a blog’s legitimacy and can have a negative impact on profitability.

4. Flexibility

Finally, there is the matter of flexibility. Some free blog services limit your options in terms of appearance and may use platforms that lack some features that can really aid in profitability.

For instance, the blogs at Blogger.com lack the categories found in their Wordpress counterparts. Other free services may offer only a few templates that can only be tweaked ever so slightly. In order to perform optimally, you should be able to make any and all desired changes to your blog.

You can find a variety of powerful blogging platforms that won’t cost you a dime. The competitive fields of hosting and domain registration make owning your own chunk of cyberspace surprisingly affordable.

So, using a free blogging service as a means to launch part of your online business simply does not make sense. The minimal capital required to own and control your own site is a definite bargain when you consider the pitfalls associated with the alternative.