As one very obvious example of this new mindset that Americans are beginning to have, I’m seeing that “regular” people are increasingly becoming part of the “prepper” movement. Self-reliance now seems to be everywhere I look and on everyone’s mind. (Everyone who reads a newspaper or watches the news, that is.) I hear ads for survival seeds on the radio. I see commercials about buying and selling gold on TV. I read articles about surging gun and ammo sales. I see news reports about people who are building bunkers and buying land to make survival retreats. I see shows like Doomsday Preppers and The Colony gaining popularity. Modern cities are seeing an increase on urban farming, “guerilla gardening”, keeping beehives to make honey, and backyard chicken raising. And books like Patriots and movies such as Hunger Games (which was originally a book) aren’t relegated to literature tables at gun shows – they’re sold at your local Barnes & Noble – and are totally mainstream. We’re not at the point of The Road or The Book of Eli just yet, but with gas prices rising as quickly as they are, I won’t be surprised if I see Mad Max rolling down the street someday soon.

My point is this: the reality is that in 2012 things are looking scary. It’s no secret that our currency is (possibly very soon) on the verge of collapse. Unemployment is high, the future is uncertain, and we know that things can change very fast. Because of that, you probably want to have a few options available to you – other than your 9 to 5 office job that may go “poof” one day. If that were to happen, what would your options be?

I want to give you a few. You need some options to at least think about your next move.

These are low-investment, easy-learning-curve ways to supplement your current existing income. They also lean towards putting something on your table, in your home larder, or otherwise add to and build up your resources. I hope these suggestions inspire you and give you some ideas.

Beekeeping
The initial investment is low – maybe a few hundred dollars. The learning curve isn’t too high either, and there are numerous books and many beekeeping websites that can teach you what you need to know. You don’t need a lot of land (your backyard might be enough). The supplies can be built or ordered in a kit - both for cheap. But the payoff can be big: bees pollinate plants which can benefit your garden (and you should have a garden, by the way), and bees make honey – which is expensive, healthy, and delicious. Urban beekeeping is more and more accepted these days, and you might even find a local Meetup group of beekeepers. Of course, you will be able to harvest totally organic honey. What to do with it? Jar it and use it, or (if your bees produce enough) sell it. Most cities have farmer’s markets which are perfect venues to sell or barter goods. If you become very knowledgeable and proficient, you can expand this into a beehive removal service or related business.

Vermiculture
What is vermiculture? Worm-raising. Sounds gross, perhaps. But worms are amazing creatures – highly useful, very beneficial for soil and gardening, and easy to raise. You can very easily raise worms in nothing more than a plastic storage bin kept in your backyard. Feed them scraps – fruit cores, bread crusts, potato peels – and they will turn it into amazingly healthy fertilizer. You will be amazed at what one handful of worms can do. How to use them? Raise a lot of them, and you could sell bait. You can sell the fertilizer. You can of course use the fertilizer in your garden as well. No one should ever throw organic matter into the garbage. Worms allow you to compost that valuable biomass and put it back into the earth.

Lawn Care
This one is obvious, but I had to mention it. A lawncare business can take up your weekends but earn you a lot of extra cash when you need it. The equipment you need is minimal: a lawnmower and weed wacker. Get your equipment at the pawn shop, print up some flyers, and get to work. It will be cash money in your pocket, whenever you work. If you build up a regular clientele, you will have a regular influx of cash in your hands.

Wine Making/Homebrewing
In most localities you cannot sell home-brewed alcohol (such as beer or wine). But you can often barter it. Of course you can also consume it (as I am right now with home-made Apfelwien), and you can give it as gifts. Homemade Apfelwein is very easy and very good (such as the celebrated Edwort’s Apfelwein recipe), and only requires about $30 to $50 in equipment. Get your bottles free from FreeCycle or Craigslist – or save your own beer bottles. For something very simple like Apfelwein you just need applejuice, corn sugar, and brewer’s yeast (I use Montrachet) and a five gallon container. Five gallons goes a long way. It’s especially economical when it costs just a few bucks to make each time. Beer is fairly easy as well, and you can order everything in an easy beer brewing kit or buy supplies locally if your town has a home-brew shop.

Soap Making
The very best soap you will ever use (I promise) is soap you make at home with all natural ingredients. I don’t even like Dove or Ivory anymore – I use homemade peppermint soap. It’s very simple to make (it’s made of vegetable oils and lye) and you don’t need special equipment. I used a hand-mixer, a big cooking pot, and shoe boxes for the soap forms. You can make a bunch at a time and it will last the whole year. It’s a perfect item to sell. You can ship it easily as well, in case you wanted to sell on eBay or your own website. There are many instructional videos and soapmaking websites to show you how to make the soap, and you can probably find all the ingredients at your local grocery store except for the food-grade lye (which you can order here – the same place I use for my supplies).

Gardening
It used to be that every household had a garden next to their kitchen. Victory gardens were once common. Gardening gave way to supermarket shopping…but now backyard gardening is making a comeback. People now appreciate the taste of homegrown vegetables and fruit, they’re more educated about the harmful GMO crops in stores, and of course they appreciate benefit of gardening and growing your own food. I am starting to see more people planting things they can eat as opposed to things that are merely ornamental.

On a small scale, you can supplement your food needs. On a larger scale, you can eliminate your dependence on the grocery store. On an even larger scale, you’ve got a farmer’s market or roadside stand business. Again, you will largely deal in cash. All you need is dirt, some fertilizer (remember the worms), and some good seeds. I recommend heirloom, non-GMO (meaning, non-genetically-modified or non-transgenic) seeds from a reputable supplier.

Canning
This is a general topic, because you can can almost any food. Again, think of both feeding yourself and a possible farmer’s market table where you sell the canned goods you produce. By canning, I mean old-time canning in glass Mason jars. Nowadays you can buy all the supplies at Wal-Mart, and you can even order BPA-free lids for your cans. (This is a good idea, as BPA is present in every store-bought can, and BPA is extremely harmful.) I’ve made canned pickled okra, kumquat marmalade, pickles, and will can or pickle everything else my garden produces this year. Tomato sauce for instance. The online resources to teach you what to do are numerous, and the supplies are readily available. You just need to do it. Before you know it, you could have a table selling salsa, pickles, jams or preserves, and whatever else you can think of – all for cash on the table. If you’re not aiming to make money from it, you can store it and feed your family healthy, delicious, BPA- and preservative-free foods year-round.

There are numerous small businesses you can start in short order that can provide you with cash.Need to raise a grand in a month? You can do that with some of these ideas. I haven’t even mentioned some of the other possibilities such as being a weekend Mover or doing House Painting (which is a very easy-to-start business with a low investment, and is always an in-demand service).

Whatever situation you’re in, and however bleak the economy might seem, you should always know that you have options. You can hold on to your dignity and go make some money for yourself. You don’t have to stand in line or sign up for a government hand out. You can make it – the opportunities are out there.

What do you think of the Bloodhound Method? Do you see any ways you can utilize it in your niche? Let me know.

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.