One of the most overlooked self-employed careers is the courier driver. You can become your own boss and work on your own terms, all while making a decent wage. Use these tips to get your courier career of to the right start.

Get moving
The first thing you’re going to need is some kind of transportation for your job. There are bike couriers and car couriers, and some people even use airplanes to deliver parcels from place to place. If you’re like most, you should choose a car or van for your delivery jobs because it’s faster than a bike (more deliveries equals more money) and it has relatively low upkeep cost. You can start out with a mid- to full-size car and move up to a bigger van later as business increases.

Get insured
It can be nerve wracking when you’re responsible for other people’s things. What if something gets broken, or you get in an accident during a delivery run? Insurance is the answer to your concern, and it will help make your business more reputable as well. Call your current insurance provider to see if they can help you with their courier rates or a referral. Insurance will give you and your customers the peace of mind that everything is covered in case of an accident.

Get digital
It can take years to build up a good customer base by traditional word-of-mouth marketing. Thankfully, the Internet has changed all of that and a good website will do all that work in a fraction of the time. You can try your hand at building your own website or use a professional company or individual to set it up. Remember, this is the first thing people will see about you and your new business, so it needs to be top-notch.

Get advertising
Your website isn’t going to attract traffic on it’s own, so to start out you’re going to need some advertising. During this time you can supplement your income with companies that list delivery jobs for independent drivers. You don’t have to spend all of your money on advertising, but a big part of your starting expenses will come from this area. When you’ve been around for a while, you will start to get repeat customers and word-of-mouth recommendations so you can lower your ad budget. Whatever you do, don’t skimp on ads in the beginning or you’ll be out of money and work before you know it.

That’s it! Obviously there’s more to being a successful courier than getting off to a good start. You need to become the trusted provider for your customers’ delivery needs, and that will take some time. If you take these first steps, however, you’ll be on the way to being your own boss in no time.

Logan is a writer who spends his time planning for financial freedom when he isn’t pounding the keys on his keyboard.

Have you ever wondered why that is? I have not only analyzed it and thought about it but I’ve experienced it. So after wasting money on special SEO software, memberships to forums, e-books, WSOs, courses, and all sorts of other money- and time-wasters…I offer my free guide. And I promise you will make money from it. Before beginning, put some beer in the fridge.

Step 1: Research a Niche
You need to figure out a niche of product. It can be almost anything that can be bought and sold – anything from a service to a tangible product to a non-tangible product. In fact I don’t care and it doesn’t matter what it is as long as it is something people buy online. It doesn’t matter if they buy it on Clickbank, via merchant’s private affiliate programs, or via Amazon affiliate links. Just find a niche that can be sold (via affiliate links, of course).

How to pick? I don’t want to give you any complicated formulas or even any simple formulas for how to choose a niche. Since this is my guide and I like to keep things simple, here’s the only requirement: you are interested in it. If you like guitars, then maybe the niche is guitars or guitar effects pedals. If you are a big time anime geek, then something anime like maybe those statues of anime women or whatever. If you like a certain kind of eyeglasses, then choose that style of glasses. You just need to like this niche enough to stick with this project.

Your niche research consists of simply picking something you’re interested in that you can sell online.

Step 2: Buy a Domain
Get yourself a reasonable domain. You don’t need to spend lots of money on a domain. Just do a bulk domain search for your main keyword with words appended to it such as “buy”, “online”, “store”, etc. Get a .com and don’t bother with anything else. The shorter the better, and no dashes.

Step 3: Set Up a WordPress Site
I make the assumption you have hosting already. If not, get cPanel hosting with Fantastico. Set your brand-spanking-new domain up with WordPress. A non-techie could probably do it with ease, so you can probably have it set up in five minutes just like WordPress promises. Put in the title of your site, put a nice template on there, set up an XML sitemap, set up pretty permalinks (category/title), and set up a contact form. (I’ll leave it up to you to pick the plugins for those tasks). Now, grab one of those beers.

Step 4: Research Ten Titles
As you crack open that beer, you should have a notepad next to you and your computer screen in front of you. I want you to brainstorm topics that relate to your niche. Some words to get your ideas flowing are “best”, “worst”, “tips”, “how to use”, “best methods”, “best uses”, “highest rated”, “reviews”, “how to pick”, “best of 2011″ (or previous year), “bargains”, “coupons”, “deals”. Depending on your niche these suggested words might work, but you might need to come up with some others as well.

This might take an hour. It might take three hours. But if you sit down and brainstorm, do a bit of searching, and write down all the good ideas, you will end up with a list of decent article titles – these are topics for the next step. Out of that list, I want you to choose the ten “best”.

Step 5: Write
If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations! You are doing better than maybe 75% of all “affiliate marketers” because most people simply hang out on forums, buy software, and then do nothing. You, however, are about to actually give yourself a shot at making some affiliate sales. That can’t happen until you write an article for each of your topics from the previous step, where you started drinking.

If you’re still drinking, it will help with the tedium – because writing a lot of content can be very boring. The most common complaint is “I can’t think of any more ways to say the same thing”. I know, because I’ve had to do it and I’ve also directed inexperienced content writers in how to write for me. But be of good cheer; it is possible to write about the same thing over and over.

For one thing, the titles you picked are hopefully different enough to where you aren’t duplicating the exact same thought over and over. Secondly, as your write your articles you can formulate some content creation steps. Here are some steps I used in a particular niche for which I had to write a series of 300+ word articles dealing with apparel and accessories:

1. If there’s a brand or company in the subcategory, type out some company info including product specialties or applications, if possible. You can use this to flesh out the text.
2. Make a generic list of product types that are in this category.
3. Divide those product types into related groups of products.
4. Form an outline by introducing the company or subcategory, then writing sentences around the groups of product types, then closing with a summary.
5. Fill in details by citing possible uses of the products.

For your niche, you will have different steps, but the point is that you CAN formulate some steps to help you create the articles. You have to first write one really good article, break down what you did, and then formulate it. After that, it’s almost like filling in the blanks.

When you’ve written your ten articles, you can go to step six.

Step 6: Publish
This is where you can reward yourself by actually doing something you can see. This is where results can occur. This is when sales can start rolling in!

Publish each of your lovingly crafted articles on your WordPress site. Of course make sure to do your tagging, any SEO stuff you want to do, and last but not least – put those affiliate links in the articles. I would suggest placing a good image in each article as well. Place an alt attribute on each pic while you’re at it.

It Is Finished!
Now, sit back and pronounce it “good”. You have something that can make money. You have a foundation, at least, from which to build upon. You have something you didn’t have before, and its something that the vast majority of “internet marketers” do not possess.

Best of all, if you’ve gotten this far I guarantee that you’ve gained knowledge, experience, and maybe some good habits that will get you going further. Why is this important? Because now you can move on to the next site. You can do it again. By the end of 2012 you can have a handful of solid websites that you can improve, build upon, promote, and (of course) make some money from.

And that is the full extent of the guide. I really have nothing else to say. That’s partly because I hate writing long articles, but also because I am confident that if you simply build one site as I’ve described, you will have learned (either intuitively or as a side-effect of your efforts) the rest of what you need to learn. It just comes with the territory, and in fact can’t be imputed by “book knowledge”.

If you build a site as I described, you have what you need to make money online in 2012. And I wish you the best of success.

I’m not promising you a thousand dollars a day. But I do promise that there’s a way to make money from your home without pouring your entire life savings into bone density scanners.

Learn What “Marketing” Means

The first step is to learn how to market yourself. No one understands value until you teach them what that value is. “I need work because we need groceries this week” has two problems with it: “I” and “we.” The first rule of marketing is to learn to think in second person: “You need this service, because your life will become infinitely easier with it. You can do such and such, and this is how. For something that amazing, it will only cost you $X.”

Repeat Customers and Word of Mouth

The second step is so important, I might even consider it step #1 ½: Start small. That’s right, take it easy. Whether you’re going the acai berry route, writing code for websites, or building furniture, don’t go all out by quitting your job right out of the gate.

Get a couple of customers or clients, and give them the most amazing work you have ever performed. Give them more than what they paid for. Don’t hold back on them—you may even lose money or spend far more time that you normally would, but it is worth it. They will hire you again, and they will tell their friends. Repeat customers are a steady stream of revenue, and word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing available. (This is about the time you should consider social media.)

Do Your Research

It’s very exciting to pull in several hundred to even several thousand dollars a month on the side; but it’s not time to quit just yet. Research the demand in your area. Start running numbers. If you were to go full time, would you need to hire more help? Do you have trade secrets that you would have to be careful with? Can you continue working from home, or would you need to buy a brick-and-mortar? What is the overhead that you have to consider?

The question that I did not answer when I first started was taxes—untaxed income is absolutely wonderful . . . right up until April of next year.

Go for It

You can ask the questions to convince yourself right out of the entire deal. But I dare you to take a risk, make an informed decision, and do a job where you hire yourself. If you ever decide that you’re done and want to go back to a 9 – 5 behind a desk, consider the amazing experience you’ve had: marketing director, quality assurance specialist, vice president of sales, chief executive officer, human resources, and chief financial officer.

Who knew that an acai berry could become so fulfilling?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Author. Guru. Content manager. Aficionado. Nerd. Freelance writer. Call him what you will, Jared Heath has a few very important passions: his wife, his writing, and his marketing. Take it from a guy who has been there—taking the risk is often worth it.

• Sometimes I just want to see what the output looks like (how it reads).
• Sometimes I want to use spun content in a static page or in a WordPress page – not in an app that spins the content itself.

Anyway, I ended up coding my own Spintax Tester. Now whenever I want to get a spun article for certain uses or if I have some lengthy spun content that I want to test, I can quickly and easily try it out. Since it’s been forever since I’ve made a tool or script available on this site, I decided to make it accessible to all. Have fun.

Spintax tester is here: http://diydollars.com/spintax-tester/

There will never be another Apple – and there will certainly never be another Steve Jobs. While his company will no doubt continue to make quality merchandise, the intangible “magic” is now gone from Apple.

In relation to the passing of Mr. Jobs, I received an email from Simon Black of SovereignMan.com. It was such a cogent statement about Steve Jobs, I feel I need to quote it in its entirety here. Enjoy.

***

You’ve undoubtedly heard by now that Steve Jobs passed away yesterday after a long battle with cancer; it’s been all over the news with wall-to-wall coverage, and iCandle vigils have sprung up all over the world. Jobs is being remembered as a pioneer, a technological revolutionary, a visionary. Rightfully so.

But it’s important to give credit where credit is due, and the world owes a tremendous debt to Steve Jobs for something else. He was perhaps the greatest living example of ‘philanthropy’ in action.

While people like Warren Buffet are pleading with the government to raise their taxes and give away their wealth to sycophantic bureaucrats, Jobs showed time and time again that the best way to improve people’s lives is to create value and be productive.

Steve Jobs was one of the most productive human beings to have ever lived; he started several successful companies which directly employed tens of thousands of people. Indirectly, his businesses improved the livelihoods of millions across the globe, from Chinese factory workers to iPhone app programmers to Apple shareholders.

In building an empire and unimaginable wealth for himself, Steve Jobs enriched the lives and livelihoods of others by creating value. Not by forced redistribution. Not by giving things away. By creating value.

Ironically, just as I write this I am watching President Obama on Bloomberg Television trying to explain how many jobs his new plan will create– 1.9 million in his estimate:

“We’re just going to keep on going at it and hammering away… until… something gets done. I would love to see nothing more than Congres act… so aggressively.”

Politicians would do themselves and their constituents a great service by comparing their own track record for enriching people’s lives against Steve Jobs’ performance, and then kindly stepping out of the way. The path to prosperity is not paved in votes, but rather in freedom: the freedom to create, produce, risk work hard… and be rewarded for your efforts.

If you have the time, I’d encourage you to take a few minutes and read some of Jobs’ own words; there are boundless sources online that will praise his creativity, drive, and intellect, but perhaps no one is better suited to explain Steve Jobs than the man himself.

Below I’ve pasted in some key quotes taken from his 2005 Stanford commencement address, and an old 1985 interview with Playboy magazine that the folks at Zero Hedge dug up. Enjoy.

Jobs on -not- following the crowd:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma– which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Jobs on change and politics:

“We’re making the largest investment of capital that humankind has ever made in weapons over the next five years. We have decided, as a society, that that’s where we should put our money, and that raises the deficits and, thus, the cost of our capital.”

“I think it takes a crisis for something to occur in America. And I believe there’s going to be a crisis of significant proportions in the early Nineties as these problems our political leaders should have been addressing boil up to the surface.”

Jobs on charity… and the importance of failure:

“And that’s the problem with most philanthropy– there’s no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation. So if you can’t succeed or fail, it’s really hard to get better.”

Jobs on careers:

“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. . . As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. . . So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Jobs on making it count:

Most of the time, we’re taking things. Neither you nor I made the clothes we wear; we don’t make the food or grow the foods we eat; we use a language that was developed by other people; we use another society’s mathematics. Very rarely do we get a chance to put something back into that pool. I think we have that opportunity now. And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.

Jobs on [the blue screen of] death:

“[D]eath is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

Well done, Mr. Jobs. Be thou at peace.