In the spirit of the Holiday Season these resources are my gift to you. I will be adding additional free resources to this page right up until December 25th !

I wish you all a very safe, happy and joy filled season :-)
Here are 8 free resources to get things started…. these eight resources are helpful (some are invaluable!) to my business. I thought you would enjoy them and could possibly profit from them as well, so here they are :-)
Enjoy!

RESOURCE #1:

A terrific intro to using Google AdWords (by a Google marketing employee).

I learned a few things, especially how Google ‘matches’ search phrases to ads on their site and on content sites (really well-done!),

http://www.visiturl.com/googlevid.html

RESOURCE #2:

Another resource I found allows you to view the top bids for any keyword you type into a box. I saw someone selling a ‘database’ of these high paying ‘terms’ for $297 or more recently -here you can search all you want for free,

http://www.visiturl.com/viewbids.html

For example type: Mesothelioma

Into the box… firms are bidding $160 per CLICK!

This is helpful if you’re setting up an AdSense page for certain terms… think about it the possibilities :-)
RESOURCE #3:

Are your digital products being stolen?

How would you find out?

Start here, http://www.visiturl.com/infosecurity.html

It’s an excellently written 6-day mini-course on security for you digital products. Shows how you could be getting ripped off and how to avoid it.

If you are selling digital products, you need to know this information.

You’ll be amazed at some of the ‘tricks’ he reveals on how your products can be stolen an dyou’ll never know it (unitl now :)
http://www.visiturl.com/infosecurity.html

RESOURCE #4:

Are you afraid someone is stealing your web site content?

You should be… web content is easy to steal and most people ‘think’ it’s OK to ‘borrow’ content from other sites (according to a survey by ClickZ Stats - formerly Cyberatlas)

You can use this free service to check anyone of the pages on your site to see if another site has stolen (sorry ‘borrowed’) your content.

See for yourself,

http://www.visiturl.com/plagerism.html

RESOURCE #5:

If you don’t have a software product that does ‘keyword research’ for you you might wnat to look at this site that does a lot of the hard work for you:

http://www.nichebot.com/

Not as deatialed at some commercially available products, it is better than I thought it would be. Try it and see for yourself. The keyword results are by WordTracker.com and the results include ads by Google, but the site is useful.

RESOURCE #6:

Before you start you next eBay campaign wouldn’t it be nice to knw exactly how much it’s going to cost you?

That’s where the free ‘eBay Profit Calculator’ or EPC I found comes in.

According to the website:

"Welcome to eBay Profit Calculator (EPC)! EPC is a simple calculator helps you calculate your profit on eBay. There are three steps to do in order to figure out the profit. The first step is to enter the auctions you listed during a period of time. This information will help EPC figure out your eBay Insertion Fee. The second step will ask you to enter the auctions that were sold. EPC use this information to calculate eBay Final Value Fee and the Paypal online payment fee. Unfortunately, there are more expenses involved other than Insertion Fee and Final Value Fee. The third step help you enter the other related expenses you may encounter when you selling on eBay. In addition to these three steps, you can also enter the time you have spent for those auctions. The time information is then used to calculate your hourly wage. This hourly rate is very important because a lot of sellers just see the money they made and forgot about the amount of time they spent on making that money. Time is money. A quick advice before you get start, you should set a period of time as a time window. Some of the examples could be a month, or a week. The auctions listed, the auctions sold, and the time spent should all in this time window."

I used to to determine if a price structure I was thinking of using would work on ebay given the fees I’d have to pay for both eBay and PayPal (it was a low-priced product).

It’s nice to know ahead of time what your real costs and profit margins are before getting into a project.

Check it out: http://www.nortica.com/UserArea/EPC.aspx

RESOURCE #7:

There are works probably in your house right now that are in the public domain. Anyhting in the public domain acan be re-published without paying royalty or copyright fees- it’s 100% free to use. If you find a work in the public domain how do you convert the hard copy into a digital file? The first few products I created using public domain material I scanned into the comuter myself and I can tell you it was hard work. Then I had to edit each scan, because frankly, the software that comes with most scanners isn’t very accurate. And since you’re dealing with generally older works, there are imperfections on the pages and that shows up on the scanned pages.

That’s why I am thrilled to find this service right here in the US. (My last book I sent to India to be scnned-they did a fine job, but the turn-around time was several months).

Tim and Sherice do a fantastic job and they are very customer service orientated.

You can find them here:

http://www.bookscanning.com/

RESOURCE #8:

I’m a regular listener to my local NPR radio station. I love the show, "CarTalk" hosted by two brothers, Tom and Ray, from Cambridge MA (http://cartalk.com/).

They are really funny guys who help people who call into their show about problems with their cars. Occasionally the show would announce that The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation - devoted to entrepreneurship -was a sponor of the show. They gave ou the website and I decided to check it out. I’m glad I did, it’s a vast treasure of free entreprenueral information.

Their website says,

"As a significant contributor of jobs and innovations, entrepreneurship is vital to the stability of the American economy. While entrepreneurship is highly accepted — and even celebrated — in our culture, there are barriers to success that threaten the United States’ long-term prosperity in our increasingly competitive global economy. There are frontiers to explore and build upon to expand opportunity for everyone.

The Kauffman Foundation is working to further understand the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, to advance entrepreneurship education and training efforts, to promote entrepreneurship-friendly policies, and to better facilitate the commercialization of new technologies by entrepreneurs and others which have great promise for improving the economic welfare of our nation."

I enjoy the articles, reports and other resources available on all the sites the Foundation has created, you might too.

There are 3 main sites of the Foundation I would encourage you to visit:

The Entreprenuer Research Database:

http://research.kauffman.org/cwp/appmanager/research/researchDesktop

The Entrepreneurship main page:

http://www.entreworld.org/

…and

A free financial benchmarking service provided by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation:

http://www.businessekg.com/