Transitioning an "offline" business to an "on

[hfloyd]

Hi,

Back in the Meet 'N Greet forum Sue Brogren mentioned that she's been a bookkeeper and is now moving to having an affiliate site about bookkeeping... http://www.netprofitstoday.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15

I am in somewhat the same boat, so to speak. For years I have been working for myself doing consulting - website development and database programming, mostly, but was often giving my clients advice about efficiency (especially using technology for efficiency). I much prefer working for myself to working for a company. I feel like the freedom and the self-respect is worth the difficult cash-flow and difficult clients. However... my patience with the difficult cash-flow and difficult clients has been wearing thin lately, and for over a year I have been working to figure out an online source of residual income and less client/project based work.

I started with a reseller business for organic fair trade coffee, using a drop-shipper. Unfortunately, even though I spent many hours putting the site together, it wasn't profitable enough to cover my hosting and merchant account monthly fees (not to mention the AdWords!)... The profit margins were slim, and with the shipping costs I had to pass on, I wasn't getting a lot of buyers. Perhaps with more time and effort I could have ramped it up to at least cover my costs, but it was proving difficult and loosing money every day so I shut it down and went in search of a simpler and hopefully more lucrative opportunity.

So here I am... I've taken my small business efficiency expertise and turned it toward an affiliate site. I hope to get some articles written up soon, and perhaps even begin selling a more comprehensive e-book at some point.

My biggest problems so far have involved getting everything done! I feel like I'm constantly reading about IM, and thinking about my site, and coming across more things that need to be taken care of - set up an auto-responder series - write articles - submit articles - ramp up the seo stuff - find link partners - organize affiliate links....

Phew!

Anyway, if anyone else is just getting started, let us know your biggest challenges/priorities, and what item on your "to-do" list gave you the best "return on investment", especially in the early stages.

Heather

[Rosalind Gardner]

Just fixed the HTML in your sig file, Heather.