How to Make Money using Facebook

As a small-business owner, you probably don't have the resources that a large corporation employs for online advertising campaigns, but social media consultant and author Brian Carter says that even solopreneurs with limited funds can gain the competitive edge in this vast cyber-arena.
"For years the Internet has provided us with the wildest opportunities that haven't been very competitive or expensive," says Carter. And with all of these options available to us, Carter is most passionate about Facebook advertising. "It provides us with the biggest opportunities—it's a great place to profit," he says.
"Advertising on Facebook is the biggest opportunity for businesses large and small," Carter says. "What Facebook advertising does, which is great, is to allow you to reach a TV-sized audience, locally, nationally and even internationally, and still target it the way you would in any internet marketing campaign, yet start with just five bucks a day. To me it’s revolutionary because businesses can reach an audience they couldn’t have ever reached before."
If you've jumped into the Facebook frenzy, like millions of business owners, by creating a Facebook page: congratulations—but that simply isn't enough. "There are a lot of problems with pages," Carter claims. Recently, he combined efforts with EdgeRank Checker and found that the average page across 4000 pages is only reaching 17 percent of their fans. So if you have 100 fans, you may only be reaching 17 people with all of your hard work! "The downside of the page is that you're not visible to all of your fans," says Carter.
Like any marketing campaign, it's apparent that you need a strategy before you launch your page. So how can a small business benefit from what Facebook has to offer? Here's what I learned from my conversation with Carter. And I'm learning much more from his most recent book release, The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money With Facebook.

• Combine your Facebook marketing plan...
  ....with the strategies that you are best at. If you're good at e-mail marketing, for instance, use Facebook ads to get more e-mail subscribers. If your website converts traffic really well, use your page to drive traffic there. Always plug into what you already know works well for your business.
• If you're growing fans through Facebook advertising...
  ...get people to click "Like" right on the ad. You will get a lot cheaper fans that way than if you send them to a fan page through your ad. If you run an ad that sends people to a custom tab because you want to get an opt-in, that's the same thing as sending them to another website, and you may not want to do that. Not everyone will put in their e-mail and click like so you are dividing your efforts. Decide first if you want fans or e-mail subscribers. If you want fans, don't send them directly to a custom tab.
• Think of your page as a social e-mail.
  There's a chance that followers will see your updates in their feed, but you have to really capture them within your first few posts. There are parallels to e-mail in this strategy; not everyone will open them. If you get a 30 percent open rate, you're doing great. On Facebook you can use the same strategies to do really well. The difference is that with e-mail marketing you don't want to send out e-mails everyday or you will lose your subscribers.
• If you're not sure...
  ...whether the greatest benefit will come from sending people from your ad to your site, your Facebook opt-in page, or gaining fans through prompting them to click "Like" right on the ad, test them all! See how much it costs you to acquire a fan, and how much traffic you get from those fans, versus the cost of acquiring an e-mail and the ROI on that e-mail address.
• Engage with your fans in your posts.
  Don't make every post a call to action. You want to turn the folks who like your page into true fans of your brand.
• Boring Facebook pages won't get you far.
  If your business isn't something that most people would consider exciting, like culture, lifestyle sports, animals, dating, kids – or anything that people get gushy about—go the opt-in route rather than the fan marketing route. If your business is attractive to many consumers, use pictures in your ads to entice them to click like. If your brand allows you the creative freedom to toss in a picture of a puppy, cat or baby, you’re golden! People will click on your ad.
• Remember one of the key differences...
  ...between using AdWords and Facebook advertising. That is, in order to generate revenue through online advertising, you must reach the right people, with the right message, at the right time, with the right offer. It's possible to do this with AdWords and Facebook ads. The main difference is that AdWords is about fulfilling demand: finding the small set of people who are ready to buy, or very close to it, and capitalizing on finding people at that stage of the sales funnel. With Google you are targeting people by what they are looking for. With Facebook you are targeting them by who they are and what they like. These are people who are likely to buy from you at some point which is a larger group of people. There's more sales potential overall.

How to profit from Inflation

How to Profit From Inflation — Gold

The grand pappy of all inflation hedges has served as a storehouse of purchasing power for more than 5,000 years. When all else fails, the shiny stuff is the last man standing.
During inflationary times, savvy investors are looking for ways to preserve their buying power, which is why gold prices generally rise during inflationary periods. Gold is especially sensitive to fluctuations in the dollar. As the dollar goes down gold goes up, and as the dollar goes up gold goes down.
The biggest gold ETF is the SPDR Gold Trust ETF (GLD). Each share represents 1/10th of an ounce of gold.
If you believe that the dollar has a lot lower to go, GLD is one way to profit from it. However, keep in mind that when the U.S. dollar dropped from 2002 to 2008, gold only rose 233% vs. oil’s 600% rise.

How to Profit From Inflation — Oil

As we’ve seen above, oil prices are much more sensitive to changes in the dollar than gold and, as such, may prove to have much more upside if you believe the dollar is set to become the U.S. Peso.
One of the best ETFs for exposure to crude is the Power Shares DB Oil Fund (DBO).
I prefer DBO over the more well-known United States Oil Fund (USO) because the guys at Power Shares do a better job hedging for contango risks that can sometimes lead to big disparities between oil ETFs’ performance and actual spot oil performance.
Aside from oil being an inflation hedge, owning oil is a great play on the growth in India and China and looks to be a trend with many years left in it.

How to Profit From Inflation — Interest Rates

Central bankers’ paranoia and fear over inflation is legendary. Inflation is the monster that lurks under every central banker’s bed. Out of control inflation can destroy a nation’s paper wealth and topple its government. When and if inflation sets in, the only real “big gun” that the Fed has is its control over interest rates.
To fight inflation the Fed jacks up interest rates. What they try to do is restrict the availability of credit in an attempt to slow down economic growth and thereby slow demand for all items. Lower demand equals lower prices — at least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
So if you believe that inflation is coming and that the Fed will have to raise rates to combat it, there are several potential ways to profit from it.

Use the Bond Market to Play Interest Rate Moves

As interest rates go up and down, so do the prices of government bonds. Savvy investors use the government bond market all the time to play interest rate moves. With the advent of ETFs, regular investors can now participate in the same way.
Aside from trading interest-rate futures, there are a few Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) that allow you to profit from government debt interest-rate fluctuations.
One particular ETF for the long bond is the Lehman Brothers 20 Year Treasury Index (TLT). If you think rates are going up, you can short the TLT.
If interest rates rise, the price of TLT will go down. The opposite is also true: if interest rates drop, the TLT will rise in price.
Just remember, if you short TLT, you are on the hook for the interest-rate payments the same way that you have to cover the dividend payments when you short a stock.
A way to mitigate that risk is to trade put options instead of short-selling. A put option will go up in price as TLT goes down in price. It has the added benefit of having no requirement to cover the interest payments that you would have to pay if you shorted TLT directly.
Another advantage with using put options is that you can’t lose more than you “put” into the position — the amount you spend to buy the puts is your maximum dollar amount at risk.
If you don’t want to short TLT and you don’t want to buy options, there is another way that you can play rising rates.

How to Use Inverse ETFs to Play Rising Interest Rates

ProFunds has two leveraged ETF products, one that tracks the TLT and another that tracks the 7-10 Year Treasury index. They are the ProShares UltraShort Lehman 7-10 Year Treasury ETF (PST) and the ProShares UltraShort Lehman 20 Year Treasury ETF (TBT).
These two “UltraShort” ETFs are what are known as “inverse” ETFs, which means that they go up in value as the index they track goes down in price. There is one big difference, though — that term “Ultra” means that you get leverage of 2-to-1. So, for every 1% the index goes down, the Ultra ETF will go up by 2%.
Remember that leverage works both ways. If the index goes up 1%, the Ultra ETF will go down 2%. If you wanted to leverage your position further, you could use options. Both of these ETFs have both puts and calls available to trade. Because the Ultra ETFs go up when the index goes down, you could substitute call options instead of directly buying the ETFs.
Inverse ETFs are terrific for investors who are unable or unwilling to trade on margin. All short sales require a margin account. This means that inverse ETFs can be bought in a non-margin account such as an IRA.

Triple-Leverage Interest Rate ETFs

If you really want to put on your cowboy hat and go “buck wild,” there is a product for you. Direxion — a name you might have heard as a way to play the bank-industry woes, via the Direxion Daily Financial Bear 3x Shares (FAZ) — has set up four separate triple-leverage interest-rate ETFs:

• Direxion Daily 10-Year Treasury Bull 3x (TYD)
• Direxion Daily 30-Year Treasury Bull 3x (TMF)
• Direxion Daily 10-Year Treasury Bear 3x (TYO)
• Direxion Daily 30-Year Treasury Bear 3x (TMV)

Each of these ETFs will give you triple the return of the daily move of the underlying index that they track. They provide a bullish and bearish ETF for both the 10-year Treasury note and the 30-year Treasury note. Each of these ETFs also trade options.
A word of warning on the Direxion products: They are really geared toward daytraders and are not appropriate for long-term holds. The reason is that, over time, the relationship of the ETF pricing and the underlying index degrades.
If you are going to play the triple-leverage ETFs, make sure that you have a tight stop-loss in place and recognize that these instruments are designed for daytraders, not longer-term investors.
The long and the short of it is that there is always a way to make money no matter what the economy brings.

Making money online - Part 4

16. Become a freelance “web geek.”

From configuring a shopping cart to installing and tweaking blog themes, there are virtually unlimited projects out there for geeks who enjoy working with small business owners to get them up and running online. Find people looking for web geeks on the Warrior Forum or other places where entrepreneurs gather.

17. Enter logo and design contests.

Fancy yourself a good designer? Try your hand at creating a logo or other design that a company loves! 99 Designs is the most popular marketplace. Beware, however; you won’t get paid unless your logo wins against many others, which makes many designers unhappy. In my opinion, this is a great way for a budding designer to build a portfolio and learn quickly what clients love.

18. Create Twitter backgrounds and e-covers.

Competition is stiff, but if you are a savvy designer, this is a good way to pick up extra dollars. Even better, if you are an artist, this is a good way to make your art skills pay off. Consider that every design will need to have a reason why the customer should buy the book or follow that person on Twitter to have a real impact. Twitter backgrounds, in particular, are in hot demand right now. For measurements and caveats of Twitter backgrounds, read “How to create your own Twitter background.”

19. Submit websites or blog posts to social media websites.

Not very exciting work, but in high demand from bloggers and small businesses. This involves setting up accounts on all of the social bookmarking services and then bookmarking your clients’ websites or latest blog posts to help them get more traffic. You may be competing against software that does this, but in many folks’ opinions, it’s better to have a real person do it. Even better is if you can goose your accounts with plenty of friends and become a star on a few of the services; then every site you bookmark has higher credibility and you can charge more. To get an idea of the social media sites you will need to sign up for, start at socialmarker.com.

20. Edit audio for others.

This is something that is fairly easy to learn and also in high demand. On Windows, one good program to edit audio is Sony Sound Forge. I use Sound Forge Audio Studio, but if you are doing this professionally, you might consider the upgrade to Sound Forge 9. Get the hang of editing out “um”s and “ah”s from audio. Even better is understanding the “flow” of an interview conversation and editing out portions that don’t make sense. Finally, learning to find and add intro music really gives podcasts that professional touch. Advertise your services on oDesk or eLance. I pay people to do this for the podcasts I am setting up on Inspiring Innovators, and it’s a job that can definitely be done from your house.

5 Ways to Make Money Online - Part 3

11. Build a small niche website.

20 ways to make money online fast.
Yes, you can make money online.I run a few small niche websites. For instance, How to Convert PDF is a tiny site that has free videos on how to convert other types of documents into PDF format. It sells a piece of software called PDF Creator, and I make a few dollars every time someone buys from that site. I promoted the site using pay-per-click ads and it was profitable. Don’t copy me directly, but do find the intersection of people needing help and a tool, ebook, or software program that will help them fix their problem. Then, create a website designed to get them to buy it!
12. Help local businesses develop an online presence.

Local businesses are struggling. Many have websites, but aren’t getting any results from them. Others don’t have websites at all. You can help by learning search engine optimization, how to set up an email list, and more, and then implementing these for local businesses. If you typically hang around geeks, web marketers, or the Web 2.0 crowd, you may be surprised how many business owners are 10 years (or more) behind you! If you can deliver results, business owners will happily pay. Find customers by going door-to-door.
13. Learn WordPress, then offer to install plugins and upgrade it.

I hired David from Web Geek 4 Hire to upgrade my blogs and install new WordPress plugins. He charges $5 to upgrade a plugin…great for him, since most plugins only take a few minutes to upgrade, and great for me, since if anything breaks, David gets to clean up the mess! You can make this a full time position; there is a ton of demand for these services. Find customers by contacting bloggers directly. Get references from bloggers who understand the value of outsourcing these tasks.
14. Become the go-to person for installations of a particular piece of software.

Anything from Amember to Quickbooks is fair game here. In the hosting industry, iDevAffiliate and Plesk Billing were the pieces of software we would have paid a lot of money to have someone else deal with. The more niche and more complex/annoying/frustrating the software, the better! Even if the software company offers free installation, you can make hundreds or thousands of dollars training business owners or their employees on its usage. Focus on one piece of software and become the trusted expert. Create videos and tutorials using screencast software like Camtasia to increase your profitability; this may also lead into a niche product that you can sell. (Amember offers “free installation”, but it took my boyfriend and I over 10 hours to configure it properly. That’s definitely something I would outsource next time!)
15. Interview other people and sell the interviews.

I experimented with this in 2008 and made over $800 from one interview. The key here is to understand a pain point that people are experiencing, interview an expert, and ask the expert the questions that the people experiencing the problem are having. Then create a small website and sell the interview. There’s more to this, including having good copywriting skills so your website sells the interview well, and knowing where to advertise, so don’t expect to immediately pull in hundreds of dollars. That said, it’s a neat way to quickly create a product. Get the interviews transcribed, then string a few interviews in the same industry together as a membership site or bundle that you can sell for more money.