If you are not able to create your own information products, you can sell others information products, or indeed physical products.

There are essentially two ways you can do this. You can become an affiliate for other companies that have product to sell. You promote their products online using special codes and each time one is sold, you make a commission from the sale.

The second option is something called drop shipping. Again you promote a product made by another company. You also process the sale and take the money. You then send the order to the company producing the product and they send it direct to the customer and bill you for the cost price. You don’t need to hold stock and the margins are higher than with the affiliate option, but obviously there is more work involved.

Want more information about different online business models and running a successful business? Visit http://academyforonlinebusiness.com/

We are all experts at something. You don’t even need to be an expert; you just need to have enough knowledge on a particular topic that someone is willing to pay you for it.

So what knowledge would people pay you for?

• Digital products
• Teleseminars
• Coaching
• Live events
• Masterminding

With your knowledge you can create an ebook, a teleseminar series, a training course, etc. All these can be made into products and sold online.

Once you have created them once, they can be sold again and again and you have minimal production costs as these products are delivered online.

Want more information about different online business models and running a successful business? Visit http://academyforonlinebusiness.com/

Make sure that you disable the notification sign and noise so that you won’t get distracted and just see what has come through – this allows you time to spend on tasks you need to complete without distractions.

Check out http://academyforonlinebusiness.com/about-us/we-recommend/ for details of what we use in our online business.

If you have build up any size list it is possible someone has tried to turn you in to your ISP as a spammer. Luckily you are using software (big hint) that keeps track of people who are double opting in, or who have purchased from you. Therefore, you can be safe that legally, you cannot get into trouble for spam.

However, I’m sure you have joined a list and then wished you did not join it because you find the emails from the person to be very spam like. There is one online business owner who sends out emails that say things like: “Did you try to call me at 3am? If not sorry for bugging you, but someone called and I missed the call, if you did then click here.” This is obviously not true, everyone he sent that to did not try to call him at 3am. This is an unethical use of the trust that person gave them by sharing an email address and opening the emails. This is very much like spam, but legally since I joined the list, it is not spam.

My point is, while your subscribers asked to join your list, and asked to receive emails from you, do not take advantage of their good will by doing such dishonest things as this. As honest and ethical Internet marketers we hold ourselves to a higher standard. Maybe we’ll miss out on a few pounds due to having ethics, but at least we can sleep at night, right?

The point is that you can, if you are complying with the laws regarding spam, you can easily defend yourself against complaints of spam by subscribers who have forgotten they subscribed or who do not totally understand the law. Permission based marketing is a special form of marketing and one that we should work hard keeping honest.

Want more information about building online relationships and running a successful business? Visit http://academyforonlinebusiness.com/

Check out part 2 of this article for more top automation tools you can use.

Tweet Old Posts — A lot of times we have created blog posts that have very important and “ever green” information that we might want to share more than once on different days. This WordPress.org plug in is an excellent tool for just that.

TweetBleep — For $20 per month you can monitor, via email what is being said about you or really any keyword that you want across Twitter.

TwitterFeed — Their home page says to feed your blog to twitter, Facebook and more. Using RSS you can essentially do just that via this cloud program. Then, you can track them, get stats, and more all from one spot.

Gist — You can have all your contacts in one place no matter what email or social media or network that they’re on. The great thing about Gist is that you can program it to keep track of certain important contacts so that you can monitor them across their social networks and never miss out on making an important connection. It works online and also in your Gmail and Outlook mail.

Want more information about social media and running a successful business? Visit http://academyforonlinebusiness.com/

Social media is a great way to market your business and really connect with your target market. However, it can also take over your life if you let it! This is where it is smart to make use of some automation tools to avoid wasting any more of your time.

Facebook to Twitter — This tool is available for all Facebook profile and Facebook page users. Simple click the link while signed in to your Facebook and you’ll see how you can choose to link your pages to Twitter, one, all or a few, it’s up to you.

HootSuite — This is a fabulous tool to use for Twitter. You can pre-schedule your tweets, monitor keywords, assign admins and more with this app. It integrates with other apps like Ping.fm too so it is a very useful tool.

Ping.fm — You can use this tool to update your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and various other social media sites at the same time. You can also choose to only update one place at a time or different groups depending on your message. This is a free mobile friendly application.

Want more information about social media and running a successful business? Visit http://academyforonlinebusiness.com/

You need to make sure that your inbox doesn’t get cluttered. This should mirror your paper and electronic filing system so that all filing is standardised.

Check out http://academyforonlinebusiness.com/about-us/we-recommend/ for details of what we use in our online business.