That illustrates the power of skillful negotiation.

Negotiation is defined as the process of conferring with another so as to arrive at the settlement of some matter. Negotiation is an art. It is a learnable art. Learning and taking action are poles apart. Practice makes it perfect.

The followings are crucial factors to keep in mind:

i. Prepare: Prior planning prevents poor performance. With proper planning and preparation, you can negotiate with confidence and power. Most successful negotiator spent 60-70% of their time preparing for the negotiation process. This is when you set your objectives: identify values, issues, and priorities. Determine what you are willing to give and what concession you need in return. Do your due diligence and gather as much information as you can. Create a strategic plan with supporting information and tactics.

ii. Probe: Once you have set your objectives and prioritized your needs, you are now ready to communicate with the other party face to face. Besides communicating your position, you need to be attentive and listen carefully to your opponent’s needs, and explore their positions. Use assertive language to imply authority and strength. Speak clearly and directly, to strengthen the position you represent. Assertive language is persuasive and it puts people forward.

iii. Propose: As both parties have shared their wants and need, you can begin to propose ideas to solve the differences. Keep all proposals conditional, flexible and brief. Rephrase rejected proposals in positive words. Do not reveal too much of your priorities as the opponents may use them against you.

iv. Trading Concession: Now that you have explored what is the premise of possible agreement, you are ready to move on to the trading concession. Keep in mind your bottom line objective, do not forget the priorities you have set earlier. If you are unsure or do not have enough information about your opponent proposals, ask, justify and lay them all out on the table. You cannot be assumptive while trading concession. Weigh the pros and cons of each concessions. Calculate the relative risk and return.

v. Close the deal: Stay calm and vigilant as the negotiation may have become tense at this point. Watch for any closing clues, words of indication, body language, such as uncrossing arms, open palms, leaning forward, etc.

Last but not least, once the deal is closed, you need to confirm exactly what has been agreed on and summarize all the details on paper.

2. Long term vision
Building a successful business is hard but not impossible. Most of the times, when we have to make certain changes in our lives, we are immediately faced with temporary setback. Some people can be bugged down easily by these challenges. A long term vision is required to keep you motivated over temporary defeat. Understand that everything happen for a reason. Embrace every experience and you will discover miracles.

3. Focus on adding value
We get paid in direct proportion to the value we created to the marketplace. People pay for product and services that can help them save time, energy, make more money and be more productive. How can you contribute to these wants? Ask yourself how you can create more value to your customers.

4. Working in versus working on the business
A business is not another job. A business is an enterprise that generates profits with or without you. You need to make a clear distinction between self-employed and business owner. A real business owner has a system that works for him, rather than him working in the system.

5. Lack of Capital
Money capital is the life blood of any business. Having sufficient liquid asset allows your organization to invest in resources that can help you to create more value to the marketplace.

6. Poor sales
Many business do not have cash for only two reason,poor sales and poor sales. You need to draw out a plan how to generate sales and revenue. You need your cash to operate for your business. Read books on sales, take home study courses. A great sales person can sell the most mediocre product in the world.

7. Poor Marketing
Most businesses have poor sales because they have poor marketing. The function of marketing is to make selling unnecessary. It is fundamental to the growth of your business. Study your market, the demographics and how they make their purchasing decision. You can have the greatest product on the planet, but with mediocre marketing skills, there will be no sales.

8. Poor Management
Management is a process which includes planning, organizing and leading. Set realistic goal. Take manageable risks. Control your expansion and monitor the revenue streams. Make appropriate changes when necessary such as decreasing expenses, increasing income, or seeking advice from professionals.

9. Poor timing
Timing is everything: Provide the right solution at the right time and to the right market and you will win big time. But you must do your homework. According to Brian Tracy, an hour of research can reduce your production cost of $10. Read everything you can about your industry, subscribe to periodicals, magazines, newsletters and etc. Make decisions very carefully. Gather all necessary information you need. Making decision without having enough information is no different that being ignorant.

10. Inconsistency
Perhaps consistency and persistency should be considered the most crucial skills for a new business manager. You must decide in advance the commitment you are willing to make for your business. Decide the amount of time and money capital you are willing to allocate to your business. You are now a leader of your organization. The destiny of your business lies in your hand.

“A journey of thousand miles starts with the first step.” – Chinese Proverb. Do it!

However, the lack of green is the most common reason why most small businesses fail. It is rare to hear any business that failed because the owner was too busy to take care of the business.

Raising money capital for you business may be hard, but it is not impossible. Before we dwell into ways to raise capital, it is vital for you, as the business owner, to determine a financing strategy.

Critical factors to consider are: What values must be created to generate the positive cash flow? How the value will be created? What is required to start, acquire or expand the business? Break down the potential risk and return.

The following are the top 10 ways to raising capital for a small business.

i. Part-time income: When no substantial amount of capital is required in the initial start up, you can create a part time income stream to fund your business venture. While doing that, you utilize the spare time to study the nuts and bolts of the industry you intend to get involved in.

ii. Love money: This is the money that come from people with whom you have establish your credibility, people who have known you for long time, or people closest to you such as relatives and family. It is advisable to have every detail of the loan in written agreement regardless of your relationship with them.

iii. Personal loan: If you have good credit standing or valuable property, you can get a personal loan from financial institution. Most financial institution will require you to have a business plan with projected revenue and financing strategy.

iv. Angel investors: These are individuals with money but no time or experience to run a business. They are usually self-employed professionals such as physicians, lawyers and etc. If you can show them how to get a reasonable return on their money in a reasonable amount of time, they will usually say yes. However, angel investors are usually very unhappy when the return is not as much as they expected.

v. Joint Venture Partner: You can utilize other people’s resources, or even credibility to get angel investors. Otherwise you can get them to contribute to your efforts in creating value to the market you serve.

vi. Personal Savings: This is self-explanatory.

vii. Line of Credit: This is also referred to as the maximum loan a bank will allow the borrower for one-year period. Most commonly used to seasonal financing such as inventory built-up and receivable financing. It could be unsecured but sometimes bank may require a pledge of inventory, receivables, equipment, or other acceptable assets.

viii. Private placement: This is a source of equity capital for private company that has decided not to go public. It is commonly used by company to raise a specific amount of capital in a short period of time. The company will offers stock to a few private investors, rather than announcing public offering.

ix. Capital reinvestment: Start small. Monitor the cash inflow and outflow of your organization very carefully. Instead of writing a paycheck to yourself to satisfy your instant gratification, reinvest the earned income into the business operation to generate more cash flow.

x. Public Offering: Commonly referred to as IPO, or Initial Public Offering. Company raises capital through federally registered and underwritten sales of the company’s shares. It is advisable for you to consult with lawyers and accountants with the recent regulations and statues that governs IPO.

2. PLR (Public Label Rights) – these are basically articles, e-books or software bundles that grants you the right to use content written by someone else as if it were your own. You can claim the authorship, modify or re-write the material anyway you like, or give it away as a bonus. There are ghostwriters out there who have written and created these products and yet they are reluctant to put them into marketplace. PLR products and be bought at fairly reasonable price.

3. 6 Figure Freelance by David Drake – If you have decided to render professional service, consider picking up a copy of Six Figure Freelancer by David Drake. Learn how to earn extra cash writing online content and not having to be Pulitzer Prize winning writer. Freelancing offers you huge profits with small risks, and you control your own schedule. This system gives you the edge over the competition and opens your eyes to huge buffet of writing opportunities available.

4. World Wide Brands – They offer the world’s largest database of e-commerce wholesalers. Every time you search for a wholesale product, there will be a built in market research to tell you how well each product you search for will sell, the competitions, search engine keywords that are most popular for the products you want to sell. The database is updated every business day by their full-time research team.

5. Become an eBay Power Seller in 90 Days, by John Thornhill – This is a step-by-step program to fully equip yourself to become eBay Power Seller in 90 Days Flat, and literally attract hundreds of dollars per day, working at comfort of your own home for just a few hours a day, selling eBooks. Once the system is setup, product delivery and payment processing is automated. All you need is couple hours to reply to emails. You will learn how to optimally price your product and get quality visitors to your sites.

6. Advanced Automated Forex Trading Signal Software – If you do not want sell digital product or physical product, nor to render any service, why not pick up a copy of the Advanced Automated Forex Trading Signal Software by Mr. Kirchberger. No trading experience is required, menial time commitment, low risk with high returns and you get to create forex signal yourself. This is proven money making method, with credible pilot no-guesswork system and therefore eliminated the “human error”. It works in any country, with any broker.

7. Widget Bucks by Joel Comm – If you are familiar with Google Adsense, Widget Bucks is one of the contextual advertising systems. Like Adsense, it can figure out the content of your site, and search through its inventory of products and serve ads that match your content. You will be compensated based on cost-per-click (CPC) basis or sometimes cost-per-mile (CPM) – the frequency the ad is shown. Usually the ad will pack with a list of ten different products that might interest the user. If the user clicks on just one of them, you get paid.

8. Legit Online Jobs – Without having to create your own website, sell anything, or carry any inventory, not to deal with any customers, or contact anybody, Legit Online Jobs offer you the legitimate ways to make money online using a computer and internet connection. This is not getting rich quick scheme. But if you follow through, you can easily earn a couple thousand dollars every month.

9. Life Coaching Resource by David Wood – The universe is continuously expanding and more people are turning into coaches and mentors for personal and spiritual growth. Do you like to help people? If money were no object, would you do it? If you answer yes to both of these questions, you may want to consider becoming a life coach. You can help people make big life changes and get paid.

10. Secret JV Profit by Dylan Loh – Many times when we have decided to start our own business, we gave in to limitations based on our limited beliefs such as not having the talent, resources and etc. Have you ever heard of the term “leverage”? It is defined as “doing more for less”. In the Secret JV Profit (where JV stands for Joint Venture), you will learn to use other people’s lists to promote your product, how to build profit-pulling partnerships and build a big list for FREE in half the time. We all have 24 hour a day and we can only do so many things in that period of time. Using the appropriate can help you achieve more by doing less. To your success!

This post is written in order to help you outsource your tasks. This is a small “how-to” guide that will allow you to look for people that can accomplish task for you. Since communication is sometimes difficult and can lead to unwanted results, this guide will aim to prevent you from making various errors beginners do when they first start outsourcing.

For this article, we’ll be using elance.com

To get started, go and signup and account. You’ll have to pay a 10$ “account setup” which will be refunded after a week. This is in order for elance to make sure you are 18 years old and that you will use the system correctly.

When that is done, we can start creating “projects”. In MyELance, Buyer Activity, you’ll find Post new project.

You’re then presented a list of fields to fill. For our first project, we’ll be looking for a virtual assistant (an assistant that can do tasks for us online, such as researches, write email, find prices, etc).

(defaults are in italics)
Posting Title: Virtual Assistant (or whatever you may want to write)
Category: Admin Support
Subcategory: Virtual Assistant
Work Type: Hourly
Budget: (Depends on you, I generally go for under 500$)
Who Can Bid:All Elance providers
Response Deadline: Bidding closes in 14 days
Sealed Bids?: Sealed, proposals are hidden from other providers.
Work Location: Work can be done anywhere.
Use Escrow: Yes, I want to use Elance Escrow service (FREE) for my project.

Now, for the bigger part of the submission, the Work Description. This is where you ask for specific aspects. This is the place where it’s possible for you to fall into the “not descriptive enough” which leads to many bids which aren’t responding to your needs. This mean additionnal filtering which we want to avoid as much as possible.

To help you, use bullet points. What you want, and don’t want. Here’s a list of things you may want to consider talking about.

- Must speak/write in a specific language
- When must the person be available for you (all day, night, morning)
- How you’ll communicate your tasks (phone, email, messenger)
- What type of knowledge and education you are looking for (be as specific as possible)
- What are the task you’ll have them perform
- How much are you willing to pay them
- State that there will be a trial period (and how long you’ll be testing them (2-6 hours))
- How long you expect to work with them
- How much job do you expect to give them (in term of hours)
- What are the period there will be work involved (if you’re looking for seasonal help)

With this list filled up, you are sure to target quite specific needs. The idea here is to make sure that our listing only attracts people that are willing to do a job under condition you’ve listed.

More often than not, people will post on elance with vague description. They’ll be getting a dozen of bids (that may sound good), but most bidders will offer too high prices or will not fulfill specific needs you have because they didn’t know you where expecting it. Remember, in conversation, the explicit is always known by both parties, not the implicit.

With that in mind, I wish you good luck in outsourcing your work, may it be for ghost writing, online researching or for web designing.

2. Delegate, and then delegate, and then delegate even more
Find every possible action that you could do and find someone else to do it for you. This will allow you to focus on higher goal and higher priorities. If you’re the CEO of your entreprise, do you think it is “normal” for you to answer to clients problems? Hell no! You should be focusing on your business direction, the next step to grow, etc.

3. Parkinson’s Law

Work expands to fill the time available.

Often noticed in offices, if you give job to your employee, but don’t give them deadlines, the task can take MUCH time. It expands as time is available. Don’t make time available to others or yourself.

When planning deadlines, make them short. People are fuel by last minute stress. When they do, they generally focus on what is the most important to be accomplished and they do a good job out of it.

4. Occam’s Razor

All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.

When in doubt in front of two solutions, this is the best advice to follow. Always look for what is simple, since simplicity often equals less time consuming.

5. DO
Just Do It, as Nike would say. Everyone is good to find goals and stuff they’d like to do, but almost no one is good at starting or doing it. Most will have ideas, but they won’t do it because they know that it’ll involve work in-between. Instead of being like the rest of the world, why not do the stuff that you talk about. Use a single step: “What is it that I need to do next?” The general idea behind this is to make progress slowly. In order to head toward the right direction, make sure you have a goal in mind. If possible, be descriptive as possible about the next step, and again, if possible, write a plan of what you’ll need to accomplish.

This is all good, but now, you must do the most important step, DO IT!

See, if I where to tell you that it’s possible to make millions in a night, would you trust me? And if I were to tell you that I know the exact secret to making a huge amount of money, would you trust me? Well, millions of products online have that same mentality, and they’re sold for approximately 1000 $.

Huge amounts of money are made when huge ideas come out of nowhere. Though, those ideas are good.

If the people that are rich stay rich and people that are poor stay poor, there is a reason for that. It’s because they know what to do. Poor people do nothing. Rich people tell poor people what to do and that’s how its work. Here’s an idea of how I think you could be making millions.

First, find 100 hours you could save from your time, because we’re going to have to use them.

During those 100 hours you’re going to be working. You’ll be creating a product about how to get rich. Or, in fact any product that could solve a problem in the world. Major problem. Because it’s what people buy.

Write a book on the subject of about 200 pages, creates about 12 DVDs that you’ll be selling for about 500 $, and do a seminar which would be recorded on tape and which would sell for approximately 1000 $.

Now you have your million-dollar idea. In fact, everyone does it, so why not you?

I think there’s a few people that actually are making thousands of bucks every month out of those sorts of product. What I mean by that is that even though there is a lot of people that state they are making huge amounts of money, they are fake. And you know what, selling online is not hard. That’s what they’ll love about Internet. Who doesn’t like Internet?

Do you actually believe that this image is legit? You should. Well, in fact, you shouldn’t, because it’s a fake one. You know image-editing software? Photoshop? Well, that’s basicly it. You know, when you’re marketing something, showing something that isn’t real is called false representation. But the thing is that it seems it doesn’t apply to online marketing, so everyone does it. That’s why we (marketers) can get you to buy pretty much anything, even if it’s the most worthless products we’ve seen.

When I first began working on online affiliates, I heard of clickbank. It looked all great and promised me good reward for selling specific products. 75% of the product price in cash for me, how could I refuse that? Well, simply because the product that I would have to sold were crap and that I, compared to many other life-threatened marketers, have moral values I stand for. I do not sell products I do not believe in. I do not make false advertisement for products. I do not sell products which gives you false expectation.

I wish those people actually told you the truth. There’s lots of work involved. And time too. It’s not a overnight success, pretty much like everything else in life. It’s much like any skills, you have to do it a lot before it’s good enough to be productive. If you make enough site, you’ll start getting the results you’re looking for. Then, just take what worked for that website and apply it to all the previous other that didn’t work and keep working on something else after.

Resume

1. Sell products you believe in
2. Success doesn’t come overnight, it’s built with time
3. Apply what works to your other project, eliminate and stop doing what doesn’t work

In four months, I’ve been able to start 2 new blogs, kept running 1 already existing. I’ve made over 200$ in 4 months, so approximately 50$ per month. Some will say it’s not much while others will rage because they don’t even make 5$ per month.

Here’s what I would call “my secret”, even though if it’s not a real secret but actually WHAT WORKS!

Simply put, here’s the 3 things that allowed me to get 200$:
1. Text-link-ads (advertisement)
2. Google Adsense (advertisement)
3. A webdirectory (through featured link selling)

Here’s how it works:
1. For Text-link-ads to work, you’ll need to have an already built and good website, which means at least PR4 and with possibly more than 250-500 unique visitor per day. This way you’ll make sure there will be people buying your advertisement space.

2. For Google Adsense, there’s not much you can do. Just make sure you advertisement is optimized (link color, background color, placement, size). The more unique visitors you’ll get, the bigger you’re going to get in income (if you keep a consistent CTR).

3. For a webdirectory, you can get free scripts at hotscript.com and edit it enough to make it personalized. You could also pay a webprogrammer to do that job. When that’s done, you submit your directory to as much others directory as you can and there will be natural linking later on. The higher you can get your PR (by submitting to webdirectory and websites), the higher your chances of getting a bigger return on featured links. I’ve sold ~15 links with a PR0 website for the cost of 2$/featured. My webdirectory is now PR3 and the prices are now 20$/featured.

The best way to make money all of these 3 “things” is to make your site popular. Popularity increases your daily unique visitor rate and makes your site more valuable to those who visit it.

If you want to make money, make sure your site is already qualified because unknown websites will have to work their way to the top until they get a consistent income. My 50$/month is fine for me but I’m sure I can increase it, so can you. It’s not about hardwork, but smartwork.

Advertising
Most commonly used by people who just started out a website and want to monetize it. The only problem with this method is that it will take you a long time before those earning start representing something good to your eyes, especially if you decided to put them on a 2-3 pages website. Those run pretty well when you have hundred and hundred of page available with good content. Less than 100 will give you some earning, but not near 10$ except if you make extremely sure that they get really good ranking in search engine and you have promoted them a lot, which is, in my opinion, a lot of work for nothing. It’s better to write more content than to advertise too much.

Affiliates
Second option the webmasters goes for. When they see that some ads are doing really well on their websites, they will generally think about doing direct work with the product owner so he (the webmaster) can rentabilize his website even more. Affiliates are great because you help them save some money on advertising and you generally point your visitors to the right direction as most of them already went to this affiliates by the advertising methods you used previously.

Domain name selling/reselling
This area requires more money and especially more time. If you can spot website domain names which you think you’d be able to resell later on, you’d buy them and park them showing a selling page. The purpose of this selling page is to tell the visitors that this domain is for sale and if they are interested, they can contact you and tell you how much they would pay for. Then it’s up to you do decide if you accept the offer or not. Like I mentionned before, you’ll need patience for this because it’s not everyday that you’ll get prospect sending you offers for your domain name, but you can make a pretty good amount of cash for one sale.

Dropshipping
Since it’s a field I don’t know a lot about, here’s small parts of the Wikipedia definition.

Drop shipment or [drop shipping] is a type of retailing where the retailer does not keep goods in stock, but instead passes the customer’s order and shipment details to the wholesaler, who then dispatches the goods to the customer directly. The retailer makes their profit on the difference between the wholesale and retail price.
Some problems related to this kind of business
While it is true that the profits can be immense, the seller effectively has to rely on the goodwill and professionalism of the dropshipper (which is, more often than not, a company that the seller knows only through the Internet). Another complication involved in using dropshippers lies in the fact that reliable dropshippers already have many sellers working with them.

Link selling
Link selling is an interesting business. If you have a website were you have empty space, you could fill that space with links to other websites. Many webmaster might be interested in getting links pointing at their websites from other websites on the same topic. All you do is you ask for a small monthly price for them to be shown on your website. You ask a monthly fee because this is a one way link, not a link exchange. Thus, when you point to another website, you transfer some of your reputation onto it, and others things such as PR (if it has much importance to you). The good thing with link selling is that you can often get to link to websites on the same topic which is good for your website (they would be considered good-neighborhood) and you also generally have a stable source of income as those who buy from you are generally interested in a long term “relationship”.

Website selling/reselling
If you don’t have time anymore or you’d just like to go work on another project, this is a great solution. Generally, you can sell your website for a 12 months income. This mean that if for example your website make 400$ per month, you’d be able to sell it for (12×400$) 4 800$. This is generally a good estimation of how much you’d be able to sell your website for. But don’t think about selling websites if it hasn’t been online for a fair amount of time because the statistics you’ll provide won’t be representable. Nothing less than 6 months. You should also understand that when you sell a website, you sell everything with it: domain(s), hosting (depends), scripts, content, etc. People are generally looking for your website for it’s domain and the content because it will have been established for a good amount of time and they know they will have a good stream of visitors already coming back and forth.

This is also another good opportunity if you think you website isn’t marketed well and could make money to someone else. It happens that sometimes you have the skills to create a wonderful website which gets a great amount of visitors but none of them use your advertising or buy from your affiliates. This is a good time to sell it to someone else who might have the ability to. If you still want to keep it though because you think you can make it to work, then you could look for a marketer you could work with to increase that amount of sales.

Whether you simply want to put advertising on your website or sell it, you have to know that all this stuff requires a good amount of work. Money isn’t free and even though this is a cool business, you still get paid for your time. The more you’ll keep working on your website and learning about methods to earn more, the more your earning will rise. How to make money online is a question that always get a new answer as new kind of industries develop.