Midlife or midstream and suddenly unemployed? Maybe it is due to your firm having downsized. Maybe it went out of business. Perhaps you were self-employed and the marketplace did not respond. Maybe you started without much capital or were not a trust-fund baby. Did you experience health problems and put on the sidelines?
Why it happened is immaterial actually. Hindsight is 20-20. The question is, "What do I do now"? Maybe you want to go back to work for someone else. For many, that is the right thing. Everyone is different. One person's sense of security is another person's hell. When health issues brought me down, in my forties, I had some important decisions to make. I did not come from wealth, I was running out of money fast. Savings was something I had never really learned to do well back then I had to do something and act in a timely manner.
"Internet gurus" were the main suggestion. Buy the program, and get to work, on my way to becoming the next semi-young dot.com billionaire. I looked at many of the e-books available, and read blogs and such, and it appeared the only ones really making money were the web gurus selling to web guru wannabes. Hence the rub. What to do. I researched. Was there a way to really open a web business without a penny? At the time, the answer was "no", at least nothing to write home about. That was eleven years and 10 stores ago. Today much has changed. You really can do it for absolutely free. No strings. No catches. No obligations. But you have to research. I wish I had known then what I know now.
My cartoon, Londons Times, was built with pure sweat equity ten years ago. It remains a non-commerce site, except for a small t-shirt store I had created with a (then) small print-on-demand tee producer called "Cafepress". I could put my images on their products for free, display them, connect them to my website, and it cost nothing. I did not have to buy a premium store through them which is $6 or so a month. If I had created slogans, I also could have put them on the tees. Cafepress was no big deal at the time. . Since that time other print-on-demand firms such as Zazzle, Printfection and others have entered teh marketplace. To sign up requires no obligation, and, is free.
So you've got your own web-store. Now what? Read the tutorials. Learn to design on products. Now they offer a myriad of products other than just tees (even complete lines of men's, women's kids, and infants wear), gifts such as framed prints, steins, teddy bears, mouse pads, posters, key chains, coffee mugs, caps, and the list goes on and on.
Though there are many schools of thought, it is best to create a niche product. If you want to create funny art or funny slogan products, be the specialist in that. If you want to focus on computer-related, software slogans, business, or whatever, do what you do best.
Visit ezines and read about affiliation. This is probably where you'll make your most money, that is, when other affiliates sign up under you. Several of the above mentioned sites have affiliate programs. Join them and let others sell your designs. If you prefer, you can sell theirs as well, or, if you have no designs, you can sell theirs only. In any caseway, you will make money if you work at it, blog, social network, social bookmark, and even distribute press releases to free sites such as pr-log.org. Learn as you go.
You may be thinking, "I've read all the way down to here, he's telling me not to find a web guru, and how in the world am I going to make any money without advertising. I must have money to place ads" . Well, maybe you have a few shekels saved up for a few Adwords, and maybe you don't. If you don't, you can still do it free, you simply have to learn article marketing and blogging. What you are reading is a perfect example of article marketing. It gives the reader valuable content (for free), that, he would pay a guru hundreds or even thousands of dollars to read the same thing and stay within his/her network (the guru is building a database of names which he/she can sell later and cares much more about that than you or whether you profit). With this said and done, don't procrastinate. You'll make mistakes but you'll also have triumphs. That's part of the game of business. Whatever you do, don't give up. Persistence is the key.
Why it happened is immaterial actually. Hindsight is 20-20. The question is, "What do I do now"? Maybe you want to go back to work for someone else. For many, that is the right thing. Everyone is different. One person's sense of security is another person's hell. When health issues brought me down, in my forties, I had some important decisions to make. I did not come from wealth, I was running out of money fast. Savings was something I had never really learned to do well back then I had to do something and act in a timely manner.
"Internet gurus" were the main suggestion. Buy the program, and get to work, on my way to becoming the next semi-young dot.com billionaire. I looked at many of the e-books available, and read blogs and such, and it appeared the only ones really making money were the web gurus selling to web guru wannabes. Hence the rub. What to do. I researched. Was there a way to really open a web business without a penny? At the time, the answer was "no", at least nothing to write home about. That was eleven years and 10 stores ago. Today much has changed. You really can do it for absolutely free. No strings. No catches. No obligations. But you have to research. I wish I had known then what I know now.
My cartoon, Londons Times, was built with pure sweat equity ten years ago. It remains a non-commerce site, except for a small t-shirt store I had created with a (then) small print-on-demand tee producer called "Cafepress". I could put my images on their products for free, display them, connect them to my website, and it cost nothing. I did not have to buy a premium store through them which is $6 or so a month. If I had created slogans, I also could have put them on the tees. Cafepress was no big deal at the time. . Since that time other print-on-demand firms such as Zazzle, Printfection and others have entered teh marketplace. To sign up requires no obligation, and, is free.
So you've got your own web-store. Now what? Read the tutorials. Learn to design on products. Now they offer a myriad of products other than just tees (even complete lines of men's, women's kids, and infants wear), gifts such as framed prints, steins, teddy bears, mouse pads, posters, key chains, coffee mugs, caps, and the list goes on and on.
Though there are many schools of thought, it is best to create a niche product. If you want to create funny art or funny slogan products, be the specialist in that. If you want to focus on computer-related, software slogans, business, or whatever, do what you do best.
Visit ezines and read about affiliation. This is probably where you'll make your most money, that is, when other affiliates sign up under you. Several of the above mentioned sites have affiliate programs. Join them and let others sell your designs. If you prefer, you can sell theirs as well, or, if you have no designs, you can sell theirs only. In any caseway, you will make money if you work at it, blog, social network, social bookmark, and even distribute press releases to free sites such as pr-log.org. Learn as you go.
You may be thinking, "I've read all the way down to here, he's telling me not to find a web guru, and how in the world am I going to make any money without advertising. I must have money to place ads" . Well, maybe you have a few shekels saved up for a few Adwords, and maybe you don't. If you don't, you can still do it free, you simply have to learn article marketing and blogging. What you are reading is a perfect example of article marketing. It gives the reader valuable content (for free), that, he would pay a guru hundreds or even thousands of dollars to read the same thing and stay within his/her network (the guru is building a database of names which he/she can sell later and cares much more about that than you or whether you profit). With this said and done, don't procrastinate. You'll make mistakes but you'll also have triumphs. That's part of the game of business. Whatever you do, don't give up. Persistence is the key.
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