Preferred Business Model

What’s your preferred business model? Do you find yourself dithering over whether you will do better in eCommerce - that is selling stuff online - or building a multi-level marketing team - OR - are you a clever money-handler?

I admit to having a great curiosity about many things, including online businesses. It’s a good thing I vowed to God years ago that I would stay out of debt at all costs. If it weren’t for that I would have signed up for many  more ventures. Just because they sounded great and I wanted to find out for sure. As it is, I have explored many free to signup businesses, and a few that I was sure would pay off greatly - or offer the very training in areas in which I had gaps.

Then I had a period of about 8 years in which I was working with a non-profit ministry. I had thought I could keep up my online businesses, but I didn’t have enough quality time left to divide up that way.   In 2015 I began to feel that I would not be staying with the mission (WTM) the rest of my working life. But I wasn’t sure how I would survive with just my online business ventures. All I could do was entrust my future to the Lord.

Then, suddenly in one evening Board meeting major decisions were made that turned everything upside down. My eight jobs were reduced to just one which I could do from home. That was to write a book about the mission’s 75 year history. At first I was excited; this meant I would be able to work at my online businesses too, and finally begin to bring in a huge income so that I could give away as generously as I had been daydreaming I would.

However, once I began to research and work on the book I saw that to get it done by the anniversary I would need to throw ALL my time into it with great diligence. My friend Linda volunteered to come help me one afternoon a week. I appreciated that, but we still couldn’t have it ready by the 75th anniversary.

The Mission was in the midst of downsizing, selling our big building and leasing a smaller office. The director graciously said to me, “75 is a number, so is 76. Let’s plan for our big anniversary celebration next year. We just have too much going on this year.”

With relief I plodded on with the book, giving it my 100% effort as I usually do with anything I tackle. The only thing I could do regarding my online adventures, was to sign up with MLSP when a friend recommended them, and listen to their weekly training webinars on Wednesday evenings.

That  turned out be a great blessing and preparation for my online work once the history book was done. I’d long felt that I was weakest in my marketing and promotional efforts with my online businesses. MLSP stands for “My Leads System Pro” and their main theme was that to succeed online you need to learn to do Attraction Marketing. Not to depend on cold calling, or paying for expensive ads, but to develop a brand and personality online and to seek to help people with information and training helps that they are looking for. Once they see you in that light they will be glad to sign up under you, or to buy your products.

So, although I didn’t get to do any marketing this way, my mind became so filled with this type of thinking and daydreaming how I would do this, that when the history book was done, (plus some giant photo albums), I was truly ready to work at my online businesses in a new and energetic way. Now I had a PLAN!

I confess… I still did explore some new business ideas and ventures, but as I  thought and worked with them, I have come to the conclusion that not all of them are really suited for me.

My preferred business model is the one which I began with when I was still living with Dad and when I’d got a print-on-demand (POD) contract for my novel, I’d discovered I needed to build a website to promote it. Fortunately, I had stumbled on SiteSell, where Ken Evoy taught how to build not just a site, but a Web Business, and to make each page keyword rich and set up with meta tags so that the search engines would bring me free traffic. It is a slower model of business, but once it takes off it usually soars!

I had already built a number of websites with that approach, but had allowed myself to get distracted by other shiny objects, bells and whistles.

As I surveyed my various business efforts and weighed what was most effective, I realized that I had no use for safe-lists, or plastering ads everywhere. I didn’t have any video skills (though I’m hoping to learn that eventually), but as I watched some YouTube videos by fellows from the IncomeSchool.com I realized that I need to go back to the model of writing niche websites with SEO optimized pages, and maybe to do some Attraction marketing in the social media fields, but that I could give up pretty well all the rest, and that I would succeed best with the writing niche sites model.

The Lord has a sense of humour. He knows that if He throws a challenge before me I am likely to take it and learn new skills. So, even though I had decided  a few years back, that I am not a true merchant, when my brother Tom was dying April (2019) he asked me to become responsible for selling his sizeable collection of diecast models so that his estranged two daughters will get a decent inheritance. The only way I could think to accomplish this was through an eCommerce website, and I warned Tom that it would likely take 2-3 years to sell all his items.

I am now forced to learn e-Commerce after all. But, I’ve always been “The Responsible One” so I will buckle down and do it, and I expect after some months I will learn to do it fairly well, and gain new skills. (Watch for more posts/articles about that in the future. I’m bound to want to tell you about my learning curve).

It seems a shame to horde all my discoveries of various kinds of online businesses to myself. So I have also created a Scavenger Hunt Game with some 8 tour guides that will take you around to visit the top seven online businesses that are worth pursuing. There is a short quiz after each tour of 4 questions.

If you get just half of them all right, you win my new e-book, “40 Online Business Ideas.” It includes descriptions of what I believe it takes to succeed in each one, and what personality types would do best at each. A summary chart in the back of the e-book shows which businesses would be easy enough for a person with a disability to be able to handle. Links are provided for you to sign up for the business that looks like your preferred model.

If you are quite new to online businesses, I would highly recommend that you sign up for my free eAction email LIST. In it I offer frequent advice and guidance on how to start and run your business, and how to discern if you are on the right track, or if you have fallen for a lemon – how to get out as quickly as possible.

Ready to check out my Scavenger Hunt? Have fun there!