Welcome new subscribers. Several very successful people I know have recently been made redundant by their employers, which prompted me to write this newsletter about taking control of your own income.

Obviously, when you work for someone else you’re basically at his or her mercy. That doesn’t mean your employer is a bad person; it just means that if he or she decides to restructure the business in some way – if your employer needs to save money and cut down on expenses – your job is in jeopardy. In fact, your job is in jeopardy at any time. You have no control over how efficiently your boss runs his or her business, or whether the company makes good profits or not. The days of having a job for life and retiring on a company pension are long gone, and they’ve been over for a long time. In today’s workplace, employers don’t expect employees to stay more than a few years, and employees generally don’t plan to. The current strategy is to move from job to job as you progress up the ladder, whatever your chosen path may be.

But an economic downturn puts all this in jeopardy, for two reasons: number one, companies may need to cut back on expenses to stay solvent. And most of them, instead of sacking one of the top people who cost them a fortune in salaries, will sack 100 or 200 (or 1,000) of the little people at the bottom of the ladder. As far as they’re concerned, the guy at the top is worth his salary because his expertise brings in much of the company’s earnings, whereas the little guy can be replaced. Number two, a company may need to close its doors permanently if there isn’t enough cash flow to continue renting premises and covering the weekly payroll and expenses. So everybody loses.

Even in times of prosperity, there’s the negative aspect of automation or technology to consider. Jobs can disappear when new technology replaces manpower.

So your job is never secure.

Consider the options if you lost your job tomorrow. You could go on welfare, which not only pays a pittance but also requires you to be practically destitute in order to be eligible. You could collect unemployment benefits, which run out after a specific period of time. Both of these options will force you to downgrade your lifestyle. And the situation is compounded if you’re paying off a mortgage and you have children. You need to feed and clothe your family and keep a roof over their heads. How will you do this without your current income? The worst-case scenario that faces you is homelessness, and that’s an absolute disaster, certainly for one person but particularly for a family.

So, what are your options?

The key is to have an income that you control. If you’re lucky enough to own rental property with no outstanding mortgage, you’ll have some form of passive income. Trading the stock market is another option, but in shaky financial times it’s more volatile and therefore less reliable. Which leaves you with a final option – starting your own business.

Now in the real world this would be a costly enterprise. But we’re talking about the internet here, and that changes everything. The internet allows you to start a business with little funding and almost no overhead. You’ll have the annual cost of a domain name and hosting, and the only other investment will be the time you put into building your site and the products you sell.

The internet has enabled all sorts of people, from all walks of life, from every age group, with all sorts of talents and skills, to create a small business with the potential to build it into something substantial. What determines success is your knowledge, your skills, and your commitment to the task. Now I’m not suggesting that you dump your job and start an internet business tomorrow on the assumption that it’s going to solve your financial problems instantly. You may hear that from some of the internet marketing gurus: “Do my course and make $100K a month!” Sure, it’s possible, but let’s learn to crawl and walk before we run.

What I’m suggesting is that you start a web site now in your spare time, presumably while you still have a job and an income. You can build your web site a couple of hours a week, a couple of hours a night, or a couple of hours over the weekend. You can find products to sell on your site – usually someone else’s products to start with – so that if disaster strikes and you lose your job, you’ll have an alternative income stream in place. If you do the work and build a viable site, there will eventually come a time when you have a choice. You’ll be able to say, “My web site is making more that what I make at my job. I’m ready to retire and work from home, promoting the site and going for the big dollars.”

There are people who have fast tracked this process, beginners who have made $50K to $100K in their first 3 months online. But those are in the minority. Others start by making $100 over the first few months, then $200 the next month and so on, steadily increasing this figure so that by the end of the year they are making a full-time salary. This is the scenario I’m proposing: instead of going for pie in the sky to start with, just make a start.

The reason I’m writing about this now is that several times a year, Site Build It (SBI), the company that runs my web site, has a special which usually lasts about a week. And this is one of those times. The current special finishes at midnight on July 6, 2009, so this may be the right time for you to get started in an online business.

What will it cost?

An SBI web site package will cost you $299 US and includes web hosting for the first year. Now if you think about what it usually costs to start a business, you’ll see what a bargain this is. If you bought a franchise it could cost you anywhere from $100K to $1M, depending on what type of business it is. If you bought a bricks and mortar business, it can cost you $30K to $100K or more. So $299 is peanuts by comparison.

What do you get for $299?

Although you’re starting from scratch you won’t be doing it alone. The SBI team has built in a wealth of excellent teaching materials. There are videos to show you how to do each step, from choosing your niche to building and promoting your web site. In fact, SBI is like an online university offering a degree in how to be successful on the internet. And all this training is included in the cost. You can become an expert on marketing online just by going through all the material that SBI gives you. And you don’t need to do it all at once. You do it stage by stage. Read the tutorials and watch the videos for the first stages – choosing your niche, planning your site, setting it up –then, as you complete each stage, watch the next video to find out what to do next.

It’s like you’re being taken by the hand by the SBI team and shown exactly what to do and when. This will cost you a whole $299 a year. Big deal. After the first year you won’t have to pay the $299 up front to renew the service – you can choose to pay monthly if you wish. The reason for this option is that SBI has discovered that, for people who are building a web site part time, business really starts to kick in after about the 15-month mark. The monthly payment option makes it easy for you to reach that point where everything falls into place and things really begin to move. From then on, the annual renewal fee is no longer an issue.

You won’t have to learn (or buy) any additional marketing technology

Not only does the $299 include all the training videos and tutorials but it also includes about $6K-7K worth of inbuilt technology that promotes your web site as you built it. SBI submits every page you build to the search engines automatically – you don’t have to learn how to do that. It sets up a blog for you – you don’t need to learn how to do that. It sets up your newsletter for you – you don’t need to learn how to do that. If you have a question, you can ask it in the SBI forum, where hundred of experienced users are more than happy to share their knowledge with you.

All these functions are available at the press of a button. This will save you not only the time needed to learn how to do these tasks manually, but also the expense of having to buy these services from other online companies.

How to get Google to pay your annual fee

Another great thing about SBI is that you can sign up for Google Adsense once you have about 10 pages on your site. Then, as you build your next pages you can put ads on them immediately. Google pays you monthly whenever you’ve earned over $100 from ads, and you earn money (10 cents or more) every time a visitor clicks on an ad displayed on your site. If you have enough traffic, which SBI helps you to get, you will have enough clicks every month to get a check from Google. If you make less than $100 a month from your ads, the money accumulates until you hit the $100 mark. In order to pay for your SBI annual fee, you only need to get three Google checks for $100 each year. You’ll get to this stage most likely in your first year. So by the time you get to your renewal date, your site will be free.

This happened to me with my Hidden Wealth Keys site. In the first year my Google ads kicked in and the site has been free ever since. Now it doesn’t make me a fortune because when I first created it five years ago I was in a hurry. Being basically ignorant of the internet back then, I decided to ignore the whole concept of keywords and just write what I wanted. Keywords are what attract people to your site; your pages have to include phrases that people actually look for in the search engines. I didn’t do this, so 90% of the pages on my site had woeful keywords that perhaps 10 people a month look for! It didn’t matter, because within a year I was making more than enough money from Adsense to cover the cost of all of my web sites, as well as making a profit. So most likely you’ll do as I did and only pay $299 once.

So what’s the current special?

Until July 6, you can buy Site Build It and get a 2nd site for only $100 extra. You can give this to someone – a friend or family member – or save it for 9 months until you’re ready to start a 2nd site of your own. Or, if this doesn’t interest you, you can buy a single site at the regular price.

The first five people who buy though my link will get four hours free coaching from me, in addition to what SBI offers. I’m a certified SBI webmaster, which means I know the system well, and I’ve guided a number of people in building their own SBI businesses. I don’t have a lot of free time, which is why I’m limiting my coaching to five people.

Think about your future. Think about where you’re going in your life. Think about in whose hands you’re placing your financial well-being. Who has control of your income right now? Is it you or is it another party? Is it the company that you work for? Is it the government?

You need to be in control of your financial life and this is one way to do it. You can make a good living online or you can make money beyond your wildest dreams, but you need to start small, one day at a time. Find a niche where you have expertise or at least an interest, one that people are looking for. SBI has a tool called Brainstormer where you can go and find out exactly what phrases people are typing into the search engines to find web sites. What is it they want? What are they willing to pay for?

So that’s the offer. Think it over, and if you really have decided that enough is enough and you want control of your financial life, then consider an SBI web site. You can get a cheap web site for far less money but consider how much more you’ll have to pay for all the other services that will promote your site once it’s ready – services that are included in the SBI package.

Here’s the link below. Click it and have a look at what Ken Evoy, the developer of SBI, has to say. Watch some videos of successful SBI owners who now live at home and earn money from the internet full time. Then decide which way you want to go.

Site Build It Web Building Package

Warmly,

Marguerite Bonneville

P.S. Even if you aren't ready to start your own online business, take a look at what SBI offers so you'll be better informed when the time comes. And remember, the longer a web site is online, the more credibility it has with the search engines. So get started as soon as you possibly can.

Here's the link again:

Site Build It Web Building Package