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I need a swift kick or hard shake tonight!

BeingChewsie

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I need a kick in the behind. I'm feeling frustrated.

Robert and I are still on track with our plan to acquire an apartment building by 5/08...all is good there, great in fact..buttttttt...I'm wracking my brain trying to leverage some skill I have into something profitable that is not a J-O-B in which I make a difference. I have a business/personal coach and her stuff is fantastic but I'm stumped on ideas, my skill set involves teaching and nursing. I'm in a very specialized area of nursing, chemical dependency/addiction. I'm wracking my brain trying to find a use for those skills(teaching/nursing) in an online business that won't end up just a job I'm chained too...that takes up 80% of my time/effort to give me only a 20% return. I can come up with some ideas but they translate into informational type sites and I don't see people paying a re-occuring fee for that. I'd like to leverage what I have and bring in other people to supply the stuff I don't have. I think that would end up being the faster way to do it.

I'm feeling very frustrated because I'm not sure if it just me not seeing an obvious answer in front of my face or if my skill set doesn't translate into anything very profitable online ....does that make any sense?

I have a very strong need to make a difference, it is one of the reasons I work with a population most nurses loathe.

I'm just looking for a swift kick in the a$$, I suck at outside the box thinking when its about me. :bgh:
I'm pretty sure I'm driving Robert to :smx6:...which given my current career is counter-intuitive so I need to get unstuck.

Generally when I read other people posting stuff like this I'm flooded with ways they can get out of their JOB using their current skill sets and farming out for what they need..I just can't seem to apply that same thinking to myself.

Sue
 
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NerdSmasher

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Well, I think I might have an answer to your problem... though there's one thing that will be problematic with it, but if you can think of a *better* way around it than I have, then it could work out quite well for you! (It's all in the big chunk of words following these)

You say that you know about teaching, and the chemical dependency/addiction area. Well, I'm not completely sure how you could add in teaching to this; but if you make a website that is about chemical dependency/addiction (ways to quit, signs of addiction, any information you have) and then put affiliate links to websites that sell products that help with these addictions, you could be making thousands of dollars per month within... probably about a month, depending on how quickly you can get all of the content onto the website.

Additionally, if you don't have any products you're actually confident in, or can't get into affiliate programs (which would surprise me) for the ones that you do have confidence in, you could always just put google adsense ads on your site. Or just put them on there as well as the affiliate links.

Now, the main problem with doing this would be getting traffic to your website, because I'm pretty sure that the medical area is a very competitive market, and the only way I have experience in getting traffic to a website is through PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. Which is exactly what it sounds like, you pay for every click your ad gets on a search engine, or other source.

The other way is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which ends up being a little bit of making the code easier to read for search engines (there are a ton of websites that will do this for you) and getting other websites to link to yours (the hard part, and most important part). This can take months, or even years in very competitive areas, but once you get enough links to your site, you will show up on the first page of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, which will definitely get you the most traffic, and thusly the most money.

In the end, this is the main complication with website businesses. Either you're selling something, in which case you can have affiliates do the selling for you, or you're an affiliate working to get traffic to your own site to sell someone else's product. Which, sadly, is what I'm recommending you do... it's actually quite profitable, and you can set it up and it will run on autopilot once everything's in place.

The only reason I recommend this to you, is because I can't seem to think of a particularly good product that you could make with your expertise, unless you want to write a book, or make a product to help people quit. Either of which you could then sell online. But, I don't know how difficult it is to make a product, and differentiate it form the competition, etc. etc. So I don't know if this is a viable path for you to take, or even where you really want to go.

Those are my suggestions... if you want more detail on anything I said, feel free to ask, I'm not sure how vague I was really being for someone who's never done affiliate marketing and other random internet stuff before.

Best of luck to you, and I hope that something I said helps!
 

BeingChewsie

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What about creating a community for the types of folks that you currently help? Something like what MJ has created here, but specifically around bringing together folks who are suffering/recovering from dependancy...

You could have forums, articles, FAQs, etc. And you could charge subscription or monetize with ads.

Just a thought...

Hi,

That is one of my ideas, as well as a community with a health promotion/wealth promotion angle. I'm heavy into health promotion, fitness, etc. They seem like great ideas for free communities..but I notice free sites seem to rely very heavily on advertising to make their money..I'm interested in the content/service generating the income not relying on advertising to do it. Thanks for idea, its high on my list of possible just not sure how to turn that into something profitable..maybe ads are the way to go.

Sue
 

nomadjanet

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Teaching parents, family memebers & friends how to deal with the family member who is addicted. There are people who will not go to the public non profit type organizations, they want information with anonymity. I don't know if you would do this with a book or with a service of some type. I think the idea of creating a community is great; if you have this going it could be a built in site to market your book or whatever property you come up with.
Janet
 
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Bilgefisher

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Perhaps setup an online class for people with some sort of certificate upon completion. Your class would have several lectures that have questions at the end. Each lecture or the class could have some sort of enrollment fee. Gear the class towards your expertise. You can basically set up the lectures once and oversee the rest of it as time goes on. As students progress, you can offer online chat 5 on 1 for a certain fee once a month. Basically seminar goes online.

Or as a one time thing, take this idea and make a software program that you can sell to detention centers or rehabilitation centers.
 

BeingChewsie

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In the end, this is the main complication with website businesses. Either you're selling something, in which case you can have affiliates do the selling for you, or you're an affiliate working to get traffic to your own site to sell someone else's product. Which, sadly, is what I'm recommending you do... it's actually quite profitable, and you can set it up and it will run on autopilot once everything's in place.

The only reason I recommend this to you, is because I can't seem to think of a particularly good product that you could make with your expertise, unless you want to write a book, or make a product to help people quit. Either of which you could then sell online. But, I don't know how difficult it is to make a product, and differentiate it form the competition, etc. etc. So I don't know if this is a viable path for you to take, or even where you really want to go.

Those are my suggestions... if you want more detail on anything I said, feel free to ask, I'm not sure how vague I was really being for someone who's never done affiliate marketing and other random internet stuff before.

Best of luck to you, and I hope that something I said helps!

Thank you very much. You have helped a lot. It pretty much confirms what I have been finding when prowling the web looking for ideas.

I feel like I'm saying I can't see the forest because there are too many trees in the way. :bgh:

Sue
 

SteveO

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It sounds to me like you have a plan for apartment investing. I'm sure that this plan requires some type of capital commitment.

What you should be doing in this case is figuring a plan that will get you enough money saved to invest. This may include working your current job for a few more years.

Sometimes going the route of starting up another business will detract both time and money in the early stages and could possibly slow your other plans.
 
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BeingChewsie

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It sounds to me like you have a plan for apartment investing. I'm sure that this plan requires some type of capital commitment.

What you should be doing in this case is figuring a plan that will get you enough money saved to invest. This may include working your current job for a few more years.

Sometimes going the route of starting up another business will detract both time and money in the early stages and could possibly slow your other plans.

Hi Steve,

Thank you. I don't want to suffer from "bright shiney object syndrome". You are right we do have a plan, we are working through the investment capital issues now by selling off some residential SF property that we were torn on renting or selling, Robert has been establishing business/corporate lines of credit for a few years, not really sure what we were going to do with them but knowing having them would be useful for whatever we did and those types of things. I just needed to be yanked back on track so I don't start chasing my tail. We are on the right path, I need to just keep my focus.

I was looking for something that could throw me some income working from home now so I could be home with my son more, but if it could slow down our plans for the apartments I certainly don't want that. I'd rather suck it up and deal now vs lose ground.

Thank you for the kick.

Sue
 

MJ DeMarco

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How about this ... create a diploma, trophy, or an award type product that congratulates the recovering addict in conquering their addiction. You can have different levels of achievement "Clean 1 year" or "Clean 2 years".

Conquering a chemical addiction has got to be the TOUGHEST job anyone can endure -- perhaps a system that recognizes and awards these folks on the accomplishment.

Along the same lines, create a site/forum that recognizes those success stories -- much like here -- instead of "Multi-Millionaire" stories, you can have "Recovery Success" stories, offer support, strategy, and more.

If you build a portal with millions of users, you suddenly become very popular as a buy-out target to health care and pharma companies, regardless of the cash flow. Sometimes "visitors" are more important than dollars to these companies.
 

CRBFL

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I "graduated" from a 27 day inpatient program just over one year ago...wow...seems like last week. Anyways here are my thoughts (already have some ideas on actual implementation)- community based, user generated, provide a wonderful service that would generate MASSIVE media exposure, promoted from within the recovery community. I have some contacts from both inpatient/outpatient programs that I have been through. As well as contacts in the AA/NA world.

The more I think about this, the better the idea is. I would like to possibly get a few people from the Fastlane community together to elaborate to as well as brainstorm with. Send me a PM if anyone wants to make this a reality.

Chuck
 
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