In this poor economy, many people are getting laid off and looking to themselves to find ways to generate an income. One way of doing this is to think about the things you know and enjoy, and find a way to make money doing it. Basically, turn a hobby into a business.
That's what I did with my magazine back issues website. I enjoy reading and subscribe to a few different magazines. I always hated throwing them away when I was done reading them. Magazine subscriptions are expensive. Reading a magazine once and throwing it away when I was done seemed like such a waste. Sometimes I saved them, but after a while you get a pretty big pile of old magazines. I never looked at them either. What I did was build a website and sell them. Luckily I work as a programmer, so I had the know how to do it. I just had to learn a little HTML, CSS and search engine optimization (SEO). Now I have a whole world of people that buy my magazines when I'm done reading them. Nice green way to recycle magazines and make a little extra money doing it. Not much, but it helps. The generated income from turning my hobby into a business should increase as my inventory increases too. I still have to store quite a few magazines, but now they have a purpose.
Starting your own little business is tough though. For a business to survive, it needs customers. You need to advertise your business, so that people will find you. You also need to strive to make sure you and your business have a good reputation. Nobody is going to buy a product from a company with bad reviews. In this day and age of the internet, Twitter and Facebook it's not hard to find reviews on a company or information on the person/people running a company. If you have bad reviews or negative information floating around about you in cyberspace, you could lose customers.
There is a reputation management company that might be able to help. Consorte Marketing will research you and your business's online reputation. They will give you a report of all the information out there about you and where it is located. They will also give you a strategy for repairing your reputation. Some of the information out there is permanent, but some can be removed. They might be able to help persuade an unsatisfied customer to change a bad review to positive, or come up with a way to push a negative article from page 1 on Google to lower level pages.
If you run a business and are worried about negative information surfacing, Consorte Marketing would be worth a look. Consorte Marketing's reputation management tweets can be followed on Twitter.
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