Start Earning A Real Income With Five Free Zlio Shops!
How do you make a little extra money, (and later on, perhaps a lot of extra money!) without selling anything, without annoying your friends, family and basically everyone that you know, without being a computer whiz, without having to stock and ship tons of products, and without having to invest anything more than a little bit of your time and effort? There is a way and it costs absolutely nothing to get started! That’s right, absolutely nothing. There is absolutely no investment of cash required, nothing to buy, and no monthly fees to set up your own online business and start making money right away!
In addition to starting for free, a Zlio shop gives you the potential to create up to four separate streams of income, if you design your Zlio business right. With every shop you create, you can make money from pay per sales, pay per click within Zlio, and on the Google Adsense ads running on your sites. While these three ways to make money are significant in themselves, the fourth is actually the most important! For every referral of another shop owner to Zlio you make, you earn 10% of their earnings, and for every referral to Zlio that they make, you earn another 5%! That’s an offer that is literally too good to pass up! Even if you don’t know a lot about creating an online business, building websites, or even where to begin, you can have your first shop online in a very short time. Just find your niche, select the products, and get started. With the Zlio program, you have absolutely nothing to lose! Read enough? Simply click any Zlio link on this page to start your own business right now!
My Zlio Experience
Building a Business with No Cash!
Several years ago, I started my first home business. However, instead of an online business, in the early 1990’s, most of us who owned home based businesses were involved in direct sales. If it was a really big company, a distributor might have a website to back up our offline efforts, but most of the work was offline. Starting a business required an investment (often a large one) in a “startup kit,” inventory, and you had to meet a monthly minimum sales quota to keep your distributorship active. Your home based business normally involved selling to (annoying your) friends, relatives, associates, and anyone else that you could convince to listen to your “pitch.” Or you did home parties, and again, you essentially became a pest to everyone you knew. How the business world has changed!
Today’s home based businesses are very different! No longer must you sell directly to everyone you know (or even to anyone that you know), and you can start a business literally on a shoestring! That’s where your Zlio shop comes in. With Zlio, you need only invest a little free time and you can soon be earning anywhere from a few dollars to a few thousand dollars per month. Yes, you heard right, the average earnings from Zlio shops is from $300 to $3,000 per month! Incredible, isn’t it? More importantly, how do you do it?
Actually, it’s a new twist on a relatively simple business concept, and it’s a creative combination of commissioned sales and affiliate marketing. Throw in Google AdSense earnings, a lucrative referral plan, and you have four ways to earn….all from one easily managed source. Are you ready to start your Zlio business yet?
In 2006, not long after Zlio first allowed U.S. shopkeepers, I started my first Zlio store, the Online Business Connection. The Online Business Connection was a natural choice for me because I had already been involved in several online business ventures, and knew that I had acquired enough knowledge to present a site such as this one. Plus, unlike just about every other opportunity I had seen, the Zlio business opportunity was (and still is) absolutely FREE to start. So, I built my first Zlio shop around all the elements involved in starting, organizing, and managing an online business.
Almost immediately, Google, MSN, and Yahoo found my site, and it began to generate pay per click income! Not a lot, mind you, but income. That income has since grown, through careful promotion and building good backlinks, and the store continues to generate income to this day.
The key to success with your Zlio shop is choosing the right “niche.” It’s not enough to just build a store or two, you almost have to build your first store dedicated to something that you’re really interested in, and that something needs to be highly specialized. As home based business owners, we’ll never be the next eBay, but we can be highly successful in our own right. So, when you build your first store on Zlio, make sure you build a store where you would shop. Build your first store, and every other store, about something that you have searched for online, and not found enough of…..that’s where you’ll find success!
Zlio Gives You Flexibility With Your Websites!
Another fantastic option with Zlio is that you can make your shops as unique and original as you are! With a little practice, you can add backgrounds, photographs, music, customize the CSS, and give your products descriptive reviews to get your pages noticed. With my own Zlio stores, I use as much of my own photography as possible! In honor of the years that I lived in Destin, Florida, beach pictures grace the headers for The Write Connection and Beaches…. Other stores feature original photography from all over… my home in Franklin, Tennessee, my parents’ home in Kentucky… you can use your own photography, or you can choose photographs from the dozens of sites on the internet where you can get royalty free photographs.
Brand Yourself & Brand Your Zlio Shops!
Another key to your success with your online shops is to brand each and every one of your stores! Although every one of my stores is different, unique, and has it’s own product niche, I link them all to my company, The Connections Group, with the free text, personalized photos, and even with their names. For example, I have many stores named The __________ Connection. Eventually, I hope that visitors to my sites will make that “connection” in their mind, and it’ll brand all my sites. Branding builds your customers’ trust and confidence in your business, and ultimately leads to more income.
So how do you “brand” your store? Branding is actually fairly simple and you will find it easy, too, once you really consider your options. Brand your stores with photos, logos, and unique design elements! There are several shopkeepers within the Zlio community whose shops you instantly recognize…because of their color, style, and design choices. Browse through the Zlio store directory, click to visit some of the stores, read the profiles of some of the community members, and you’ll see what I mean. You might even get a few ideas!
Creating Your Niche Market is Easy!
With thousands of products to choose from, creating your niche market really is easy. Just use your imagination and pick something you really love, and then build an entire shop around that niche. Your shop can be revolve around your hobbies, your work, or even your pets…the only limit is your imagination!
One of the niche stores that I have created, Affordable Country Living caters to those who love the country lifestyle. And, as such, I have chosen products that have a home grown look and feel to them, or that invoke the laid back, casual country style that I find very appealing (and hope my customers do, too!).
In addition to carefully selecting each product, I’ve also taken the time to categorize each product, and then further customize the description, add editorial reviews, and improve the “Product Visibility Index.” The Product Visability Index is a recently released update to the Zlio software that enables the shop owner to give each product unique attributes, thereby making the product more visible to the search engines. More visibility in search engines translates into more visitors (and more revenue) for your shop! All of this means devoting a little extra time to the details in the beginning, but the return on the investment later on is well worth it.
Once you have the shop set up, updating is easy! Zlio gives you a “Task List,” from the moment you create your first shop – not only does the task list help you create the shop, but later on, you can see at a glance if your shop needs updating, and exactly where to update.
Create Links to Promote Your Shops!
One of the biggest things you will need to learn, and something that I am still learning, is how to promote your Zlio stores without spending alot of cash. While I promote my stores in lots of ways, one of the most important ways is through link building. Building good backlinks increases your page ranking, which in turn increases the findability of your websites, which soon translates into more traffic. And more traffic creates more sales. Sounds pretty simple right? Right. But where do you build links? And how do you build backlinks?
There are lots of ways to build good backlinks. The easiest is to link your stores through the shoproll feature in the Zlio shop interface. These links to other stores are indexed by the search engines and count as a link to and from your store, thereby enhancing your store’s page rank.
Another great way to build links to your store is to start a blog to promote your Zlio business, individual stores, and even specific products. We currently publish two weblogs, Online Biz Connection and Everyday Opinion. We use both to promote our online activities, however, be careful that you actually have something to say with your blog, and that you’re not just shamelessly overloading it with links. A poorly ranked blog can actually lower your page ranking in the long run.
Another not so well known way to create links is to place advertisements on the many free classified listing sites available online. That’s right – the advertisement links are indexed by the search engines and your ad will create a link to your store. Some of the places that I have used for free ad placement include Craig’s List (be careful of overposting – they’re very strict), Webclassifieds, Stumblehere, and a host of free, online, localized sites. Get creative with your classified ads…there are literally hundreds of sites that allow you to promote for free!
Don’t Forget Referral Income!
Perhaps most importantly, don’t forget the referral income opportunity that your Zlio business offers! As mentioned earlier, for every person that you refer to Zlio, you earn 10% of their income, and for every person that they refer, you earn 5% of that income! This is a very important point, because this is the way to really turn on the money machine.
How do you get referrals? The absolute best way to get referrals is to set the best example you possibly can. Success breeds success, so make sure that your Zlio stores are literally a cut above the rest! Create, design, promote, and then promote your shops some more. And, when people see your stores, and see your success, they will approach you for the referral! Your success will speak for itself, yes, but if you are successful, then you, too, will speak volumes to others. That’s the true secret to selling anything: believe in what you do and others will follow!
A Final Word…….
One final piece of advice…be patient! Every business idea site that you find on the internet promises overnight wealth, vast riches, blah, blah, blah. There is NO business opportunity out there (no, not even one) that can or will deliver on this promise. Just like anything else worthwhile, creating an online business takes time, effort, and lots of patience. Yes, you will see results (sometimes right away), but building a real, full time income takes time!
You can start your store in a few minutes, but realistically, expect to spend time customizing your logo, background, and adding your own special touches to your stores. And, be prepared to invest time in determining your categories, choosing products, writing descriptions, and setting everything up. After that, your time will be spent promoting your sites, and of course, regularly updating your stores!
Many people start businesses expecting instantaneous results, only to quickly become disillusioned when they don’t instantly make thousands of dollars. As a result, they give up…and two weeks later, they’re chasing another “opportunity.” Don’t be one of those people!