My e-book: Settle Down; Making Money in Retirement
Last summer I celebrated my 80th birthday. That puts me about half way, or even further, through my retirement years. (I am assuming 65 to 92 for those years and that I can live with “style” during that time—working hard but no tubes and no chemo). I am not trying to sell investments, annuities, or insurance with this book. My goal is to share my successes and my setbacks with you. I hope you will benefit financially and have a little fun while reading it and afterward while you are running your own retirement business.
Costs to live
It costs me about $5400 per month to meet minimum expenses since I retired.
That is $65,000 per year.
Assuming I start retirement at 65 and live to be 92, that is $1,755,000 with no present value
Revenue
Social Security covers about half my retirement minimum. I have investments in 401k’s that provide 1/4th of annual minimum and recently acquired a reverse mortgage which contributes ¼. If I want to travel, drink good wine, or entertain at nice restaurants, I need more money.
My strategy for “retirement”, (i.e. the time since I was 65) is to work as long as possible. When I can no longer work, I am starting an at-home online sales and marketing business, which I hope will contribute another ¼ or more for the rest of my life. The online business is designed for money but also to keep me engaged, busy, and having fun. After reading this book, you may want to join me.
Finding your niche
I don’t want to invest a ton of money in starting the new business so I am taking the “bootstrap” approach. Keep my upfront costs to a minimum but plow back profits as they materialize to support my growth. Whenever possible, I take the “free” route, the low cost plan like for LinkedIn or Aweber.
In golf, they say, the bet is won or lost on the first tee. That is, how you negotiate the handicaps will probably determine your success for the bet. Same here, finding the right niche to pursue is key to your success in your retirement business.
You can get a good start to researching your best niche by reading chapter 5 and starting with www.clickbanks.com.
You want to pick a niche that has enough business but not too much competition. You want to look forward to going to work every day rather than dreading it, thus you pick something that you are interested in, even passionate about.
Marketing and Selling
Hundreds if not thousands of promotional and marketing tools now exist on the Internet. I have spent hundreds of hours researching them to come up with the best mix. What I suggest may not be the optimum mix but it is a good start and I suggest you give it a try. I have boiled the marketing mix down to the following:
Public Relations
PRLog.org has a free public relations distribution tool which I recommend for starters. Once we get some sales momentum, we will switch to a paid PR plan.
Building Your Website
Every online business needs a website, even by definition. I used http://www.web.com to help me build mine. It is professional looking and is an inexpensive way to get started. As of March 2015, weeb.com has a special promotion where they waive the $800 set up fee but you are obligated to a monthly fee of $114.95 which can be cancelled at any time.
Once the site is established, that is just the beginning. You have to build on it further as new products and services evolve and every site requires maintenance. Web.com has a good support organization who are knowledgeable and friendly. You can use that support when you get stuck while you are managing your site as the business grows. You can see my site at www.bobsmithwriter.com and my wife’s at www.waldenwood.net.
Your Blog
I set up a separate site for my blog with BlueHost.com using Word Press as the hosting tool. Blue Host helps you to find your domain names free of charge and only charges $3.95 per month for the hosting fee. They also have good support 24/7. Check out my blog site at www.britainstreetblog.com.
Search Engine Optimization
Keyword selection and analysis is important for driving traffic to your website. My recommendation is to learn about SEO and Pay per click advertising (PPC) but not to spend much money on them during the first year or so of your start-up business. Once you get to make some profits, you can plow back some of that money to SEO-PPC campaigns which will grow your business even faster.
Facebook Selling
Facebook is the most popular social media tool in the world. Using their FAN page to highlight your business, it is also a valuable and free tool for driving traffic and making sales. I started with a promotional Facebook campaign at $189 per month and got tons of traffic but I did not think the quality of the traffic was what I wanted so for the moment, I have cancelled that promotion out. I intend to get back to it as a high priority once I start to make some sales.
Building your business page on Facebook is fairly easy but takes time. You will want to do that as one of the high priority tasks in your start-up.
LinkedIn Selling
LinkedIn is strictly business and should be one of the first of the social media networking tools that you use. Use Premium plan if you have the budget for it, otherwise stick to Basic plan which is free but go to Premium as soon as you get some revenue coming in.
LinkedIn Sales Process
• Go to linkedin.com and create account
• Log in to your account and go to Profile
• Complete your personal profile
• Add Connections and get as many as possible
• Set up your company page
• Join or create groups and participate in discussions actively
• Create a marketing strategy with LinkedIn
• Create a posting strategy and develop a discipline to post regularly
• If budget permits, start a LinkedIn advertising campaign to establish your personal and company brands and to develop connections, establish relationships
• Use Like, Comments and Share to develop relationships and accomplish your LinkedIn results
• Focus on your niche—like my niche is funding your retirement with at-home online business
Email Selling
I recommend www.Launchrock.com as your free auto responder and www.AWeber.com if you plan to pay for one, about $32 per month. The paid responder has a richer set of features but you can probably get by with the free one for starters.
The auto responder is mandatory. It will help you stay out of SPAM-law trouble as it stores your email subscription list and automatically sends out thank you and confirmation letters as you sign up subscribers or make sales.
Follow-up email campaigns are your best form of pro-active marketing. Follow up at least a dozen times until you make the sale which might be the actual closing of a sale or it might be just the conversion of a reader to a subscriber who allows you to email to him or her.
Be sure to do a quality control check on your email marketing program. Proof read all pages and the content of all your emails, check links, browsers and devices to be sure that your emails appear correctly and as you intended.
Backup your lists in at least three places, on your desktop or laptop, on an exterior disk drive and on a cloud database system.
E-commerce
Your online store must be able to accept credit cards and other types of payments such as PayPal.
I recommend Shopify.com which supplies the following features at reasonable costs:
• Secure shopping cart
• Ability to accept credit cards from Visa, Master Card, American Express and Discover
• 70 payment gateways around the world
• Multiple languages
• Automatic carrier shipping rates
• Automatic taxes
Credit card charges are based on three different plans:
• Basic 2.9% + $.30
• Most Popular 2.5% + $.30
• Unlimited 2.25% + $.30
Analytics
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage (Wikipedia). Web analytics has the following high-level functionality:
• a tool for measuring web traffic
• a tool for business and market research
• Assess and improve the effectiveness of a website.
Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns.
It helps evaluate how traffic changes to a website after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends which is useful for market research.
This is just a brief description of Google Analytics. We need to get set up and practice using it to just begin getting the benefits of it. You can also learn by checking into Utube.com and searching for Google Analytics.
Here are some examples of the questions you can get answers for when you are using Google Analytics.
• How can I make decisions about these statistics on my site to get the most traffic and convert to the most sales?
• What landing pages are most popular and how many of each of the following statistics were there in a given timeframe?
o Number of visits
o Pages per visit
o Average duration per visit
o Number of new visits
o Bounce rate
Closing
Let me close by saying this. No matter how rich you may be the odds are good that you will need some additional income in your senior years. I am here to try to help. Yes, I want to sell you my book but I don’t have any annuities, investment programs, real estate or other large ticket items to sell you. I am well into my own retirement years and I would like for you to join me in this what may well become our “final journey”. Some of you may think that starting an online business is too technically complicated. Believe me, I am no guru and I will keep my explanations so simple that even I understand them. You can too. You can do this too. Jump on in. The water is great.
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