Establish Your Plan B

No matter what your profession is, your economic status, or even your education, everyone has a Plan A.  Your Plan A is your primary source of support to survive and to feed yourself and your family.  It could be your job, your retirement fund, your farm, donations or whatever it is that you rely on for food and/or income.

But what happens when your Plan A fails? What if you become disabled? What if you lose your job?  What if inflation spirals out of control and vaporizes your retirement fund? What if a drought devastates your farm?  You need a Plan B.

Establish a Plan B

Everyone needs a Plan B, but unfortunately most people haven’t even considered taking that very important step.  What is a Plan B? Quite simply it is your alternate source of income.  It’s what you fall back on when your Plan A fails.  It could be a home based business, an income producing hobby, an investment of some sort, or even multiple streams of income. It’s your own insurance policy.

Sometimes, the success of your Plan B can even outpace your Plan A. In such a case you may find yourself re-prioritizing your life so that your Plan B becomes your Plan A. Just imagine if that plan is doing something that you enjoy! Maybe you’ve heard the Confucius quote: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”

But don’t quit your day job just yet.  Establishing those alternate streams of income will usually take much longer and much more effort than responding to a help wanted ad and applying for a job.  It’s usually something you have to build up over time.  But you do need to do it. And you can do it. I know, because I have.

Let’s take a quick look at an example of my Plan B.  At the time of writing this article, I am spending a few months living in the Philippines with my wife. I’ve had to take this time off from my normal work while we focus on getting her visa before returning to the U.S.  I am living full time on my Plan B income right at this moment!  This is proof that what I’m sharing with you does work.

Subscribe Here For Free, and I will share with you everything I know about Establishing Plan B income.  This article just scratches the surface, and the information that I’ll share with you in the newsletter will be short and sweet each week, teaching you everything I know. Yes, you can do it!

Want a Plan B but not sure where to start? Here are just a few ideas that have worked for me.

The most successful Plan B’s are going to have multiple streams of income from multiple sources.  Ever hear the term “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”?  In this article I’m going to share with you several tips and ideas that have worked for me. By no means is this a complete list of ideas, (I’ll share more in the Plan B newsletter) but these are all ideas that have proven successful through trial and error and is why I’m sharing them with you.

If you enjoy writing, social media, or graphic arts and if you are motivated to put in at least a few hours each week, every week, you will make money.

Start a Blog

Do you like to write? Have a skill, topics, or opinions that you want to share with others?   Start your own blog. A blog can act as your central hub for all of the rest of your social media.  Yes!  You can make money blogging and I will show you how.

But what if you don’t like to write or don’t know how?  Don’t worry, you can still be successful at blogging and I will show you how to do that as well. Here are some blogging platforms that you can start with.

• Blogger.com  This is a Google owned platform and is completely free and one of the most user friendly platforms for blogging. The downside is that it can be a bit of a hassle should you decide to later transfer your content to your own server.
• WordPress.  Very flexible and very user friendly. You can get wordpress for free or on various hosting platforms.  If you want more control and flexibility of your blog at a very good price, then I recommended hosting through Hostgator.   With Hostgator, not only can you install wordpress, but you also get your own domain name and have access to install many other content platforms right from your cpanel
• Strikingly.  If you love those striking new mobile friendly websites, then you might want to build your website through Strikingly.  After all, laptops and PC’s may soon be a thing of the past for most people.  Everyone is switching to mobile devices.
• Write blog posts for others.  Maybe you are good at writing but not ready to start your own blog, or maybe you just want to become an established author in the blogging community while driving a little traffic back to your own blog.  One way you can do that is by becoming a guest author for other blogs.  Start by contacting your favorite blogs and ask them if you can submit a guest post.  Don’t forget to link to your blog and/or relevant affiliate program your articles

Not good at writing or don’t know how?

Not everyone has the skills to write great content.  But don’t let that stop you from achieving your goals!  There are many legal and ethical ways to acquire content either for free or at a low price.  Here are a few ideas I’ve used in the past.

• Ask for guest authors.  Many authors are eager to get their content out to the public and more than willing to have their articles posted on various blogs.  This is a great way for them to take advantage of backlinks for their blog and/or affiliate programs, while providing you with free content.
• Native advertising.  If your blog receives a lot of traffic, then it’s not hard to find sponsors who are more than happy to write you an article (and pay you for it) as long as they can include their sponsored link in the article.
• Outsourcing content. If you have a little money to get started, then you can outsource your content.  Sites like Fiverr.com, Crowdcontent.com, and Outsource.com can provide you with writers on almost any budget.  I have used Fiverr.com and have had great success with them.  You can often find skilled authors for as little as $5 per article.
• Hold a writing contest.  Come up with a great prize that you can offer the winner.  The best article to get published gets the prize!   Just be sure to structure your contest so that it’s fair for the participants.
• Curate your content.  Find a great Youtube video that you think will be of interest to your audience.  Embed that video in your post and write a little bit about that video

Getting Traffic To Your Blog

There are many ways to get traffic to your blog. You can use social media, newsletters, search engines, reviews, link exchanges, etc…  Just be sure not to spam.  Spamming can be detrimental to your website.  I will share with you some of the ones that have seemed to work really well for me.

• Facebook and other social media.  I have built facebook pages for several sites now.  APN already has over 150,000 fans, some of my other pages already have over 15,000 fans.  Each time I have a post to share from one of my blogs, I also post it in my social media to send traffic back to the blog.
• Start a Newsletter.  All of the blog posts that I want to share, I also send out in our weekly newsletters. Newsletters drive a lot of traffic to my posts. I have always used Constant Contact and I love it.  You can set up sign up forms or import your contacts directly from contests and other promotions. If you sign up to Constant Contact here, you’ll get a $30 credit.
  Another provider that I’ve used is Aweber.  If you are interested in setting up auto-responder campaigns, then I highly recommend them.  They are ideal for setting your newsletter on autopilot.
• SEO.  Search Engine Optimization.  SEO will help your site be found more easily by search engines.  There are many scammers out there offering SEO services, so be very cautious of them.  Much of your SEO can be done on your own.   If you are on wordpress you can use a plugin called “SEO by Yoast“.  I’ve found it to work really well for optimizing keywords in my articles, plus it’s free to download.  You can also find many SEO tips and tricks just by watching Youtube.
• Link Exchanging.  Find other relevant blogs that you enjoy and ask them if they’ll exchange links with you.
• Guest Posting.  Write articles for other bloggers and include a link to your blog in the article.

Build your social media

• Contests and Drawings.  There are many platforms that you can use to promote contests to drive traffic to your website, facebook pages, twitter, pinterest, etc…  Most of my experience has been with Rafflecopter.  They are very user friendly, easy to setup, customizable, and work well with most social media.
• Popups.  You might have noticed that many bloggers have been using a popup to invite people to “like” their facebook page, join their newsletter, take advantage of a coupon, etc…  The one that I like the most and use on all of my sites is called NinjaPopup.  It’s very simple, easy to customize, and you can set it up to display as frequently or as infrequently as you want.  Just remember, if you have it popup too much your readers won’t like it.
• Sharing posts.  Just like exchanging links, seek out other pages who post similar content as you and then agree to share each others posts on social media

Monetize your blog to earn Plan B income.

Now for the fun part.  Here’s where you can make Plan B income from just from your blog.  There are many ways that you can money from your blog, but we are going to focus primarily on advertising and affiliates.

Affiliate Income

Affiliate programs are a simple way to start earning money right away for your blog without having to cold call advertisers. Best of all, they are free to join. Here I will list some affiliate programs that have worked for me:

• Share-A-Sale.  This one is one of my favorites.  They take the guesswork out of joining affiliate programs, and there’s no shortage of them to choose from as they have several thousand companies and products to browse through.  Here is just a sample list of the thousands of affiliate advertisers you can sign up to through Shar-a-sale
  Garden Tower Project
  Hydrapack
  True Organics
  Philip Safety Products
  Zen Water Systems
• Amazon Associates.  I have made quite a bit of money from Amazon associates.  The great thing about Amazon, is you can hyperlink your unique code to any of the products and pages in amazon, and even if your readers don’t buy the product that you linked to, you will still get commissions for other products they order as long as their cookie is still active.  You can even hyperlink your unique codes into the articles that you write (Native advertising).  Remember the guest posting I told you about?
• Clickbank.com I’ve also been quite successful with clickbank.  It’s mostly all digital products, but many of them even offer residual income
• Solutions From Science.  They offer several different survival and preparedness products.  You can sign up to their affiliate program here
  
• Plus So Much More….

Subscribe to my free newsletter: Establishing Your Plan B, and I’ll share even more affiliate program ideas with you.

Some Additional Resources

When you get heavy into blogging, you’ll soon realize that you are going to need graphics, images, spreadsheets, and other resources.  Here are a few that I use quite often:

• GIMP (GNU Image Manipulations Program)  In my opinion it’s every bit as good as Photoshop, plus it’s free to download.  No adware, no spyware, just a great high quality program for free.  You can find tutorials on how to use it on Youtube.  Download GIMP Here. 
• Open Office.  Another great free program.  You can create spreadsheets, professional documents, slideshows and more.  You can even convert files to .pdf.  Download Open Office Here
• Fotolia.  I get most of my stock images for  blogposts from Fotolia.  Images are royalty free and most with few or no limitations on the licensing.  That means you can edit, crop, alter or change the images without any restrictions and use them for professional purposes.  You will have to buy the images, but you don’t have to worry about royalties
• Photodropper.  This is wordpress plugin that I also use.  Images are public domain and free to use.  Most of the images aren’t really great quality, but there have been times that I’ve found some pretty nice gems to use.
• Instantteleseminar. Use Open Office to build your presentations, use Instantteleseminar to present them as webinars.  Invite your readers and newsletter subscribers to join your webinar.  Present one of your favorite affiliate programs, host an event, show off a new product.  I’ve generated more revenue using this platform to promote my affiliates than any other system.  You can get a 21-day trial for just a buck here. 

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Establish Your Plan B

Happy Blogging!