How to Start an Online Business Fast and Easy

The fastest and easiest way to start an online business is buy a turnkey e-commerce website. A turnkey website is a website that ready to generate sales and make money online. The website is completely functional and provided with everything you need.

Where to buy a turnkey website?

There are many companies offering a turnkey website in web hosting business. These companies generally are web hosting service providers. You can own a web hosting business by joining a web hosting company’s reseller program. Many of the reseller programs usually are free to join and you are allow to set your own price for each product you selected for reselling. To search for a web hosting reseller program, you can go to Google and enter the search term 'web hosting reseller program'.

If web hosting business doesn’t sound interest to you, you may consider starting an online store. You can buy an online store for less $100 from a website calls getestore.com. They allow you to choose from 3,500 items with brand name such as Sony, Xbox, Panasonic and many more for reselling on your store without paying upfront for inventory. The suppliers will also handle all the packing and shipping works for you.

If you are only interested to start an affiliate marketing business. Pluginprofitsite.com is your solution. The site will recommend you to join several popular affiliate programs. After you have joined their recommended affiliate programs, the owner of Pluginprofitsite will create a brand new professional e-commerce website for you to promote all the affiliate programs you have participated. The cost isn’t cheap; you need to pay about $50 per month for hosting your website and the affiliate membership’s fee.

To generate sales, you need to drive targeted visitors/traffic to your site. The more traffic you get the more money you will make. Here are some of the techniques you can use to drive traffic to your site:

Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising
PPC advertising programs offer an opportunity to advertisers to promote their websites by bidding for top-listings in the search engines on the keywords of their choices. PPC advertising can drive instant traffic to your website but they can be very expensive if you don’t use them wisely. Here’s a link to download a free e-book that will teach you how to use PPC advertising effectively for your online business:
http://www.googleadwordsmadeeasy.com/1

Search Engine Optimization
Search engines can bring you a lot of free targeted traffic for long term if your website ranks top in their listings. To rank high, search engines optimization is a must. Search engines optimization involves optimizing your webpages for your targeted keywords and increasing the number of websites link to your site. It will take a lot of time and effort in search engine optimization. Here’s a website contains helpful basic and advanced SEO tutorial:
http://www.seo2020.com

Article Marketing
Writing articles and publishing them on article directories is another free way to drive traffic to your website. You will promote your business in the article’s resource box by introducing yourself and your website. Your articles can drive thousands of visitors to your site within weeks if your content is impressive.

http://moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-start-online-business-fast-and.html

Dubai's prince buys $2.7 million camel

MADINAT ZAYED, United Arab Emirates - Dubai's crown prince paid $2.7 million for a camel during a desert festival celebrating Bedouin traditions in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, state-run media said Tuesday. ADVERTISEMENT



The festival also included a camel beauty contest, where thousands of owners strutted their animals in a bid for the top prize of finest overall camel and separate categories such as best neck, head, lips, nose, hump, legs or feet.

Sheik Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the son of Dubai's ruler, Sheik Mohammed, bought 16 camels for $4.5 million, including one female camel for $2.7 million, the state news agency WAM reported.

The agency called the price tag "unprecedented" but it was not clear if it was an official record.

The hefty sum was still a fraction of the record price paid at auction for a horse. The Green Monkey, a thoroughbred colt, was purchased at a Florida auction in 2006 for $16 million.

There was no indication what Hamdan, Dubai's heir apparent, planned to do with the animal though female camels are often used for racing. Owning fine camels is also a mark of prestige for the ruling elite in the Persian Gulf.

Abu Dhabi's ruling family organized the nine-day festival in a bid to preserve the nomadic way of life in the desert that predates the discovery of oil in the region in the 1960s.

More than 17,000 camels from the oil-rich Gulf countries — the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain — were registered for the beauty contest, which gave out millions of dollars in prize money and more than 100 four-wheel-drive vehicles and pickup trucks, the agency said.

Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates and, with the lion's share of the country's oil resources, the richest of the seven semiautonomous emirates that make up the country. Dubai, the largest emirate in population, has been undergoing an unprecedented boom as its leaders shape it into a major financial center.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080408/ap_on_re_mi_ea/emirates_camel

Politically Incorrect Sale Increases

ONE of the last things a fledgling New York City business wants to do is alienate a powerful city politician. But that is exactly what happened to Scott and Kim Myles, the owners of 5 Boroughs Ice Cream.

In June, James P. Molinaro, the Staten Island borough president, issued a statement attacking the couple’s Staten Island Landfill flavor (which contains fudge, pieces of brownies and cherries) as “insulting and derogatory” to the borough, and urged that New Yorkers boycott all of the company’s flavors.

But after the boycott, four Whole Foods stores in Manhattan quadrupled their ice cream orders and Whole Foods affiliates in Connecticut and New Jersey began ordering the company’s ice cream for the first time. The Myleses, who live in Astoria, Queens, attribute the rise in orders to publicity from the boycott. “It tripled our sales and gave us a lot of momentum,” Mr. Myles said.

“We never intended to offend anyone.” he added. “We intend our ice cream names to be tongue-in-cheek with a New York sense of humor.”

The 5 Boroughs brand, with ingredients and names inspired by New York City neighborhoods, is now in 34 stores, with seven flavors available. This spring, the company introduced Upper East Side Rich White Vanilla and Jackson Heights Mangodesh (mango ice cream spiced with cardamom supplied by an Indian grocery store in Jackson Heights).

It is a small business, but the Myleses have lofty ambitions. They would like to turn their mom-and-pop operation into a national brand that can compete with much bigger names like Ben & Jerry’s.

While the Myleses think of themselves as the Ben and Jerry of New York City (they, too, have clever ice cream names and a portion of some sales goes to charity), competing as a small ice cream business in the New York market has not been easy.

Things that Ben & Jerry’s can take for granted — like equipment, distribution, production and marketing — have been a challenge for the couple, who had no previous business experience and who operate no brick-and-mortar store. After four years, the two have still not quit their day jobs, Mr. Myles as a graphic designer and Ms. Myles as a hairstylist.

“It’s deeply frustrating,” Ms. Myles said. “Capitalism is stacked against the small-business guy; the system is not your friend. Gaining your own shelf space, having your own plant, it’s all difficult. We have a great idea, we have standards and we have heart. For us to get recognition and be highly profitable, we need an investor.”

For now, they say, they are getting by on good word of mouth, ice cream demonstrations at grocery stores, and by renting space at upscale food fairs.

The couple know they have a long way to go, but they also realize how far they have come.

After they realized that they wanted to start a business, they contacted Malcolm Stogo, a consultant and founder of Ice Cream University, which offers seminars to aspiring entrepreneurs. Mr. Stogo helped them find equipment and space to rent in the back of a small ice cream parlor in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.

Commuting on three subway trains from Astoria to Fort Greene for nine months in 2003, Mr. Myles began making batches of various flavors. (In 2005, when the ice cream parlor closed, the couple found a production facility in Boonville, in upstate New York, to make their ice cream.)

The company started selling half-pint containers in a few stores in 2004 and added full pints (at about $5) to its growing roster of stores last August.

“I give him a ton of credit; he had very little money,” said Mr. Stogo, who remains an unofficial adviser to Mr. Myles. “His product wasn’t great at first, but he kept improving it and finally got it right. The baklava had the best taste and the best texture.”

Mr. Stogo was referring to the couple’s Astoria-inspired Bakla-Wha?!, which had its genesis in 2001. At the time, Mr. Myles had begun playing Dr. Frankenstein with an ice cream maker that the couple received as a wedding gift, creating unusual combinations for his friends and family to try.

For Bakla-Wha?!, he mixed bits of Astoria-made baklava pastries with vanilla ice cream, cinnamon and walnuts. Ms. Myles said that was the couple’s “light bulb” moment when they realized they were sitting on “a million-dollar idea.”

But that wasn’t the initial reaction from their Astoria baklava supplier, Nick Sakalis, co-owner of the Victory Sweet Shop. “It was completely out of the blue and I was a little hesitant, to tell you the truth,” Mr. Sakalis said about the idea for a baklava flavor. “But it was good, much better than I thought it would be.” (The flavor is temporarily unavailable because of production issues.)

The Myleses say they are often approached by vendors and organizations that want them to use a special ingredient. They are discussing a possible beer-flavored delight with a Greenpoint, Brooklyn, brewery and are using a Park Slope granola maker’s ingredients for the tentatively titled Park Slope Granola Stroller — in honor of the neighborhood’s many baby strollers.

The Myleses say they are not concerned about offending a few people as long as most of them appreciate their humor — and their ice cream. They have received a few complaints that South Bronx Cha Cha Chocolate and Upper East Side Rich White Vanilla perpetuate racial and ethnic stereotypes.

“These are not racial slurs,” Mr. Myles says. “We’re celebrating New York’s culture and ethnicity.”

http://www.5boroughsicecream.com