Hi folks,
A few weeks ago I reported to you that I was planning to go to Rhea's Entrepreneur Days in Phoenix at the end of August.  It was quite an eye-opening weekend for me, and I thought I would share with you some of the things I learned.

First of all, we need to change our mind-sets.  We have been trained to pursue jobs with wages.  Over the years I have come to realize that regular folks, working 9 to 5, will never get ahead because the government takes about half of what we earn, if you include social security and medicare.  It wasn't so for earlier generations, which had a lighter tax burden and could pass on some assets to their kids. 

Rhea Perry gave me a vision: to "bring the dads home."  In fact, there are some homeschooling dads who are already home, thanks to Rhea and her entrepreneur education.  Two of these families had businesses selling homeschool curriculum--you might have heard of the Chris Davis family of the Elijah Company, or the Bob Farewell family of Lifetime Books and Gifts.

Rhea sees it as a matter of education.  At Rhea's Days there were various individuals who have become wealthy, and who are willing to share with the rest of us how they did it.  In a way it's the great American success story -- person with no money works hard and does well. But the difference is, in these cases the hard worker used his money to purchase some real estate or stocks, and also figured out a way to use these to generate more money.  These Christian guys are willing to share their methods with the rest of us, at Rhea's Days. It's pretty unique!

Well, I don't have any money laying around to invest, you may say.  Don't let that stop you!  You can write an ebook, and set that up on the Internet to generate money for you while you're doing something else. 

Here’s the recipe for the situation: 

1. Choose a topic for your book. It should be answering an urgent question for a niche market, such as how to find a lost cat, or how to identify children’s books that would resell on ebay.  If your current expertise doesn’t yield any topic, pick something you don’t know much about and read five books on it.  Now you know enough to write an ebook of 50 to 100 pages.  It won’t violate copyright, since ideas aren’t copyrighted—only specific wording is.
2. Before you write the book, set up a “mini” Web site for it, with the domain name the same as the book name:  findalostcat.com, or whatever.
3. On the site, put up a way to sign up viewers for a newsletter.  Create a newsletter that has to do with your topic using an autoresponder (newsletter service).
4. Write your book, a chapter at a time.  If you are not comfortable writing it, you can find a ghost writer at elance.com who will do it for a few hundred dollars probably.
   
5. Finish the book. Put it on Clickbank.com for automatic sale at around $40.  Tie it to your Web site.  Write more articles; keep the newsletter going. 

If you want loads of great information on how to set up a Web business, visit this Web site: http://www.kqbusiness.com/ .  It's a listing of Terri Johnson's newsletters on the subject. Terri was at the conference too!  

I'll tell you more later. In the meantime, keep Rhea's Entrepreneur Days in mind. Maybe you can come next year, at the beginning of August in Nashville.

Blessings,
Phyllis Wheeler
Motherboard Books
www.motherboardbooks.com