Internet Home Business Articles

I remember watching the greatest player to ever play the game of basketball, six time NBA Champion Michael Jordan.
On many different occasions Michael Jordan clearly stated that determination, focus, and persistence is what helped
him reach his amazing accomplishments.  There was one feeling in particular that gave Michael the strength, power, and desire to succeed as the greatest player to ever play the game. PASSION.

Webster’s dictionary defines the word passion as a powerful feeling or an outburst of strong feeling towards something.
This powerful feeling towards something can motivate us to accomplish anything.  Passion is also the same feeling that
has allowed hundreds of individuals run a successful online business.

Think for a moment of the many different occasions that a friend, coworker, or family member has told you that you didn’t have the ability to accomplish something.  After they tell you that your plan will not work then they advise you to move on to something else.  This is the first obstacle that anyone who wants to start an online business has to bypass.

Here’s the big question.  Are you going to pick a business that your peers recommend or are you going to pick an online business that you are passionate about?  There are two important questions that must be considered before you start an online business.  Is the business or product marketable, and do you feel passion for it?  If you can answer yes to these questions, you can start building an online business.

Over 90% of individuals that start an online business fail.  There is only one way to fail.  You fail when you quit. Some of the responsibilities of starting an online business include:

Finding or creating a product
Finding a web host
Creating a web site
Finding a domain name, plus much more.

More than 70% of the time that you use to run your business should be spent marketing.  In the beginning you will have
to keep your regular job and run your online business part-time. You have to set up a strict schedule and you must follow it.

Education is another important aspect of running an online business. You want to stay up to date with your competition
and new marketing techniques. During the first few months of your business you may not see any profits. Any profit
that is earned during the early stages of your business should be reinvested in the business.

Working when you are tired is another obstacle that you must bypass. There will be many occasions that you will feel like sleeping after working a full eight hours on your regular job. Friends and family can be another obstacle. You have to include your friends and family in your schedule and at the same time reserve time exclusively for your business.

All of the factors that we just mentioned must be taken into consideration when starting an online business. It takes tremendous amount of energy to build a successful online business. Will you do it?  Only if you start with one thing. Pick a passion. Pick a business that you feel an outburst of strong feelings towards and you will fuel yourself with the intensity and power that only passion can supply.

Are you a headless newbie?

I know I was when twelve month ago when  I started looking into setting up an online business.  Whichever way I turned people were willing to offer me advice, e-books, freebies, newsletters, amazing money making opportunities, advertising, search engine placement and much more.  This was great but my head started spinning and my credit card started to melt and worst of all I wasn’t making a cent.

I learn a lot during this time and have started to see my commission cheques increase so here are my top 5 tips to help
the newbie with the credit card rush to stop sit back and actually start earning some money.

1: Before you sign up for anything read the sales page fully and see what you are actually getting for your money.  Many of these pages contain a lot of information and the tendency is to skim them for the interesting parts ie: How much does it cost.  This is exactly what they are designed to do,  so slow down and read everything fully.  When I first started I signed up for several programs just because they seemed to offer a lot for not a lot of money, this was true but none of it was at all useful.

2: Join some relevant forums and ask questions about the affiliate programs you are interested in.  People are only too
happy to help and you will get some good honest feedback both good and bad.

3: When you decide on a program give it time and if it doesn’t work straight away keep going.  One of the biggest mistakes is to jump from program to program to find one that will work. As with any business it takes time to build and see results so stick with it and keep telling yourself what brought you to internet marketing.

4: Decide on a monthly budget and make sure you stick to it. With the ease of online credit card transactions you will often be tempted by amazing one time only offers, these are designed to get a snap decision from you.

5: Don’t keep checking your emails for sign ups.  Firstly you will be disappointed if you don’t have any and secondly you will be sent lots of emails offering you the world.  Its very easy when you are down to try something else and this often involves your credit card.

That’s my top five but the biggest piece of advice I have been given lately is to take the odd day off and don’t do anything,
especially at times when you are down and nothing seems to be working.  I did this recently and came back to five sign ups, the feeling was great and I went about my business with new vigor.

Some marketing experts would have you believe that the key to a successful home business is limited to a select few and that this chosen bunch have tapped into vast secrets where riches are to be found in abundance.

Others will push forward the idea that their product or service is all you need to make a monthly residual income a reality.

Statistically only 5% of budding entrepreneurs will make it online.

To be perfectly honest I don’t know which if any of these ideas are true but I do know what has worked for me and I believe it can work for anyone who is willing to take a risk, invest the little cash it takes and make a consistent effort for the next year or two to build their own work at home business. Note I am not saying that this will work overnight, I’m not even saying 6 months. Yes I did indeed say a year or two.

Having worked online for over five years now I believe I have finally found a PROVEN system for building a successful home business which will continue to grow year after year and, because it is MY business, it can be passed on to my children and children’s children.

This is not a new idea but it took me a long time to realize it and just as long proving to myself that it works.

How do we know it works Mal and you’re not just spurting us a load of old cobblers?

Well the proof IS in the pudding and the fact is that the five websites that I own all have a Google rank of PR6 and feature in the top pages of all the top search engines including Google, Yahoo and Altavista for many popular “home business”/”work at home” search terms and it is all down to my strategy.

Just do a search for the term HOME BASE BUSINESS on Yahoo or Google and you will see my site(http://www.freeadvertz.com) at number 3(At the time of writing).

Try doing a search for WORK AT HOME BUSINESS in the same search engines, see my site (http://www.workfromhomebiz.biz) at number 6(At the time of writing) and climbing.

How about BUSINESS TIPS or BUSINESS NEWSLETTER, and again my site (http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com) is number ONE(At the time of writing) for both terms.

These results are repeated across all the major search engines.

Have you seen enough? Do you need any more evidence that this works? These are only a few of the terms that we rank highly under. We are actually in the top rankings for scores of other “home business” search terms.

I could easily put this evidence and info into e-book form and sell it but I neither have the time nor know-how to do so(If you can help me out in this area then get in touch). So I’ve chosen to write this article and tell you exactly how you can build your own business to great success in three easy steps.

You have the proof now here is the plan:

In a nutshell the best way to build any online business, and the least expensive, is through a twin track approach of website search engine optimization and reciprocal link building. As I mentioned above this is not a new idea but you now that you have proof that it works, do you have the conviction to follow through?

Here it is in 3 easy steps:

1. Register and host your own domain name: http://www.workathomebiz.info/hosting.html (Put some home business keywords in your domain name, ie workathomebusinesssuccess.com)
Or:
Get a FREE website with hosting here:

http://www.workathomebiz.info/pluginprofitsite.html

Please don’t settle for a FREE domain name as this will NEVER be your own and can be taken away from you at any time or if the company goes bust you have lost all your hard work in building your web presence. Register your own business name.

2. Download web position gold, optimize your site for your keywords and submit your website to all the major search engines:

http://www.webpositiongolddownloads.com

(You can download a free trial from this site. You will need a full version to work this strategy.)

3. Start building those reciprocal links using links manager: http://www.workathomebiz.info/linksmanager.html
(Put your keyword terms in your linking text when exchanging links)

I currently get around twenty reciprocal link requests per day, and this will increase with time. At the beginning I barely got two daily. It may be slow at the beginning but as your business gathers momentum after a few months it will be like a steam train at full throttle, absolutely unstoppable.

I am a 31 year old father of two from Ireland who started from scratch, so if I can do it anyone can.

Believe me people it doesn’t come any more simpler than this.

So if you are serious about really building a successful online enterprise then DO IT NOW and tell me about your success in the coming months.

One more thing before closing. If you are going to give up on this strategy when you don’t see immediate results then please don’t even begin. The key to building success is PERSISTENCE PERSISTENCE PERSISTENCE.

Writing articles is one of the best ways to get free targeted traffic to your website and isn’t as hard as you may think!
You don’t need to be an expert on the topic you are writing about. Just pick an area that is related to the theme of your website, do some research using a search engine and before you know it you will have more knowledge on that subject than most.
Here are a few tips for writing your article:
·  Think up a catchy headline to attract readers. If you’ve not re-written your headline at least a few times, it could probably be better!
·  Try to keep the length of your article to around 500-1000 words
·  Keep paragraphs short and to the point – lots of white space makes your article easier on the eye for readers
·  Don’t waffle – people can become bored quickly on the internet and it’s easy to go and read another article instead.
·  Don’t forget to spell check your article and if possible get someone to proof read it for you.

Once you have your article written, you must remember to add a resource box. This is your chance to tell everyone about you and your website.

If someone has taken the time to read your article right to the end, the chances are that they will be interested in finding out more. This is a great opportunity for you to gain another targeted visitor to your site.

Your next task is to submit your article, complete with its resource box to as many article directories as possible. Start by adding the article to your own website, then submit it to as many directories as you can find.

You can find a list of article directories that I have successfully used in the past on http://www.homebiz-direct.com/articleWriting.html
Alternatively, just type “Article Directories” into Google and start working your way through the 2.1 million results returned!

Finally, the best part …  After a few days you will begin to see your article appearing all over the web.

The beauty of submitting to article directories is that other webmasters go there to search for content for their own websites or newsletters, so you may find your article in places that you didn’t expect for months, or even years to come.
Still not convinced? Here are a few more good reasons for you to start writing:

1. Improved Search Engine Positioning – all these high quality links to your web page from content rich pages will increase your popularity with the search engines
2. Increased credibility for you – it will help to brand you as an expert in your field
3. Free Advertising – you have the opportunity to advertise yourself and your site through your resource box
4. You can use your articles to add original content to your own website and send to the subscribers of your own ezine
5. It won’t cost you a penny!

Writing your first article can be scary, but the rewards gained from doing so are more than worth the effort!

What are the characteristics of the Best MLM Leads? This is a good question to ask before you spend any money buying leads to build your MLM business. Before we get to that let’s take a look at why you would want to buy MLM leads in the first place.

Over the years the multi-level marketing business has gotten a black eye because of the over hyped promises of money and freedom. Very few people have ever achieved a high level of success in any MLM business. And even fewer have ever been able to maintain the level of achievements over a period of time.

That does not make MLM companies bad. Nor does it make the opportunities they afford the average person as a way to make extra money or even as a way to drastically change your lifestyle. It can be done and using MLM leads is a great way to do it.

There are 2 big benefits to buying MLM leads.

1. It gets you away from approaching your friends and relatives. If you have been in more than one MLM business over the years you may have already approached them and used up your credibility when you were unsuccessful.

2. This is a duplicate way to build your business that you can pass on to your downline. Any successful network marketing  business will tell you that one of the main components of success is duplication. Anyone can buy leads and work them over the phone or thru the internet with the use of an autoresponder.

If you are unsure of how to work a lead over the phone I would suggest getting the book “Recruit Your Way To Millions” by Fred Stegge. After reading this book you will be able to explain what you do and what you offer to a new prospect in 30 seconds or less.  http://www.team-schuman.com/recruit-your-way

If you are unsure of what an autoresponder is or how to use one read this article I wrote “How To Effectively Use An
Autoresponder.” This is an absolutely essential business tool if you are going to succeed online with your MLM business.

http://team-schuman.com/articles/article15.html

Now that you understand some of the benefits of buying MLM leads and how to market to them let’s take a look at what are the characteristics of the Best MLM Leads.

1. How many times are the leads sold? Many MLM lead companies sell their leads over and over. You will be contacting a
prospect that has already been marketed to. Personally I like leads that are exclusive to me.

2. How old are the leads? Would you rather contact a prospect that has expressed an interest in the past 48 hours or in the past 48 days. Being able to strike while the iron is hot so to speak is a great benefit of a fresh lead.

3. How many leads do you get for your money? Obviously the more leads you can get for the best price the more leads you can buy at a time. This is especially important when you are first starting or when you are helping your downline get started.

4. What is the quality of the lead? Nothing compares to a lead that contains both a phone number and email address along with a few qualifying answers to questions like “How much can you invest to get started” or “How soon do you want to get started” or When is the best time to contact you?” If a prospect is answering these type of questions you are getting a much better quality lead than if you just have a name and email address.

5. What is the response rate? This will improve as your skill level at working your leads improves, but the fresher higher
quality leads will give you a better response rate even when your skill level is low.

6. Do your leads come with any extras such as an autoresponder, training on how to work leads, pre-written email marketing letters, phone scripts, your own website, flash presentations, etc.

These are the top qualities of the Best MLM Leads. Be careful when choosing a place to get your leads. Not all MLM Lead
companies are created equal. It is going to be the single most important decision you make when trying to grow your MLM Business. Make the wrong choice and you will waste your time and money as well as the time and money of your downline. Make the right choice and you can be building your business successfully for years to come.

Once you have written your make money article what do you do with it?

I will say without a doubt one of my top strategies for getting my Team-Schuman.Com website on page one of several
make money at home search engines is due to writing, publishing, submitting and posting articles.

I have listed several things that have worked for me to get my article out to the marketplace.

Put It On Your Website

If you have a website the first thing to do is get an article page and start putting articles on it.

Search Engines love this. They are constantly checking for fresh content and our job is to give it to them.

Adding your new articles as you write them is great because they are loaded with keyword content that relates to your
website and helps improve your popularity with search engines.

Trade With Other Websites

Offer to post their article on your article page in exchange for adding your article to theirs. This can be a
little more time consuming as you seek out webmasters to trade with, but it will work as well.

Have Your Article Submitted By A Professional Submission Service.

This may cost a little, but in my mind it is worth every penny. All you do is register yourself, pay them and submit your  article.

These type of companies will submit your article to 1,000′s of publishers and article directories in seconds. This is a great way to get name recognition for yourself, increase traffic to your website, sell products, get subscribers for your newsletter and on and on.

Here are a couple of my favorites:

Bill Platt does a great job with his article submission service “The Phantom Writers.” He’s great to deal with and can get your article submitted to 6,000 to 12,000 publishers in less than 72 hours. I have actually had articles submitted by Bill in 12 to 36 hours. He offers excellent personal service. http://www.thePhantomWriters.com

At Submit Your Article their claim to fame is submitting your article to thousands of publishers in seconds. Another very good company. http://www.submityourarticle.com

Trade With Other Publishers-Start Your Own AutoSubmit

Do you publish an ezine of your own? If you do you know that it is tough to constantly come up with fresh articles of your own. How about finding other ezine publishers that would run an article of yours in their ezine in exchange for you running their article in yours.

Run a few ads in an ad group like Theresa at MyWizardAds: offers:  http://www.team-schuman.com/mywizardads

Or here with 2 Bucks An Ad:  http://www.team-schuman.com/2bucks

Set up an autoresponder and call it something like “publishers.” Load your first message with an offer to trade ads and articles. Set a goal to add 5 publishers a day to your autoresponder. I prefer Aweber or GetResponse.

http://www.team-schuman.com/aweber

http://www.team-schuman.com/getresponse

Add publishers of the ezines you have subscribed to. Then subscribe to more. Keep adding publishers everyday to your autoresponder.

Whenever you write an article shoot it out to everyone in your autoresponder. In a year’s time you could easily have
over 1,000 publishers hearing from you about your new article.

Your cost for this was a little bit of time everyday.

Submit It Manually

I saved this for last because it is my least favorite, but if money is an issue for you and you have time then just start contacting ezine publishers and article directories one at a time and offer your article. Do a Google Search:

http://www.google.com

Type in ezine publishers. Then type in article directories. Start submitting your articles to the directories and to other
ezine publishers.

Here are 3 very good places to manually submit your articles:

http://www.authorconnection.com

http://www.ideamarketers.com

http://www.ezinearticles.com

Over a period of time you will see your articles popping up all over the place. All of this takes time, but is well worth the effort.

What is the point of writing a great article and never having anybody see it.

So you have decided to start up your own home business and after hours of searching you have decided on the program you are going to join.

Now stop and take check before you rush in.

Yes there are thousands of people running their own home business and yes they are making money from them.

What you need to stop and consider is that you will be running you own business and what does any business need to make money?  You may come up with several answers but let me tell you from experience the key resource to any successful business is its employees.

You can have the best product or service in the world but if your employees are not up to scratch then you will not have a successful business.

Now a quick search of the net will bring up thousands of affiliate opportunities and companies willing to offer you the job of promoting their service or product and they require little more than you email and user name to get started.  They do not really have a lot to loose by employing you to advertise their service as they only pay you for result so no sign ups then no payments, the only real sack able offense in their eyes is spamming.

However you do have plenty to loose so consider yourself to be your first employee of your business.

What I am asking is would you employ you?
Do you have what it takes as an employee to make your business successful?

Now would be a good time to sit down and think of the questions that you would ask an interviewee before you were to offer them a job.

Here are 5 simple questions I asked myself before I committed to starting my own online business.

1) What makes you want to start your own business?

2) How many hours a week can you offer the business and do you have a quiet place to run your business from?

3) What specific skill can you bring to this business?

4) Where do you see yourself in 12 months time and what are your goals?

5) How much do you want to earn a month?

As I said these are the simple questions I asked myself, most of us have had a job interview or two so you can think about the questions you were asked and how they may relate to running your own business online.

You can also take this process one step further because as you start to succeed with your online business you will start to build your own down line.  You need to look on these people as your employees and consider do they have what it takes to help you grow a winning company.

A great way to use this is when you send out your welcome email include a few simple interview questions.  This will help you in 2 ways -

Firstly: You will learn more about you sign up and what their intentions are, this will help make any follow up more personal.

Secondly: Will they make a good employee?  If so then spend some time on them and with your help they will grow their business which will in turn grow yours.

So would you employ yourself?

If you have decided the answer is yes then its time to start your business and start taking on your first employees.

Just one last thought for you:
“By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.” Robert Frost

Are you spending hundreds of dollars on advertising campaigns, only to find out that you have earned a very small profit or none at all? Here are 5 illustrious strategies that will help you explode and create viral traffic to your web site.

1.Reciprocal Links – Think of reciprocal linking as a mini joint venture. Go to any major search engine and search for sites that are related or similar to yours. The majority of web masters that exchange links with other web sites have a links page. Look for the links page and see if they provide instructions on how you should link to their web site. Contact the web master and inform him/her that you have linked to their web site and request that they link to your web site in return. Remember to provide the web master with the page that you have placed their link on. Always make sure that you provide the web master with your web site url,title and description so that he/she can link to your web site in return.

If you keep contacting other web sites on a consistent basis,at least 10% of the web masters that you contact will exchange links with you. You will receive traffic from your link partners and also from the search engines. Link popularity is a major part of the search engines algorithm. Remember to only contact web masters with related web sites that have a links page. Contacting unrelated web sites can result in spam complaints.

2.Writing Articles – This strategy creates viral traffic from all different angles. The key here is to provide a resource box at the end of your article with a link to your web site. Once you write your article you will need to submit it to the many different announcement lists on the internet. There are companies that will charge you a small fee to submit  your articles for you, or you can submit them on your own for free. Once you submit your articles the potential for hundreds of visitors begins. Ezine publishers can send your article to thousands of readers and other publishers will place your article on their web sites.

If you have a good resource biography at the end of your article hundreds of people may visit your web site. Your rankings will start to rise on the search engines due to high link popularity, creating another source of traffic.

3.Affiliate Programs – This is probably the most rewarding strategy to create viral traffic to your web site. The idea here is to recruit an unlimited number of affiliates that are willing to sell your products for a commission. You never lose money with this strategy because you only pay your affiliates when they make a sale. This strategy will also increase your link popularity since many of the affiliates will send traffic to your web site by linking directly to it. If you do your research you will find companies that can setup an affiliate program for you. Another option is to purchase software that  allows you to setup your affiliate program.

4.Free Services – Providing free services is a strategy that yahoo and microsoft have been using for years. The idea here is to provide a free version of a service and a paid version. If someone upgrades to the paid version of your service they should be able to benefit from extra features. This strategy can easily explode the traffic to your web site if you provide a useful service. Visitors will refer others to visit your web site creating a never ending flow of traffic.

5.Manual traffic exchanges – A traffic exchange allows you to visit other web sites in exchange for visitors to your own web site. Many traffic exchanges have a referral system in place. If you refer someone to join the traffic exchange, you receive a percentage of visits to your web site any time your referrals surf the exchange. The key here is to do your research and look for a traffic exchange that has a good anti-cheating system. A good anti-cheating system will ensure that only real visitors are looking at your web site.

These are 5 illustrious strategies that can explode your web site traffic. Implement some or all of these strategies into your marketing plan and you will create a never ending source of viral traffic to your web site.

Having made it to the ripe old age of forty-six I find myself thinking more and more about retirement. My wife and I have discussed several times what we would like to accomplish in our retirement. If you are like us, thoughts of traveling, spending time with family (grandchildren!) pursuing a hobby or contributing time to a worthy cause come to mind.

Having two daughters in a private college and a high school senior at home certainly puts a crimp into thoughts of an early retirement. These same two daughters will also be getting married in the near future. Plus the mortgage, the car loans, insurance, and on and on. Does any of this sound familiar?

Your company retirement plan will provide some income as will your 401k, if you have one. Social Security may be there but I personally am uncomfortable counting on that. So, you ask yourself, “what can I do now that I haven’t already been doing”. Generating more income now to put away for retirement is an option. But there are limits on the amount of overtime you can work, or that your employer will allow. You could take up a second job but many times that will be substantially lower paying than the first job. Not to mention the amount of time taken away from your family.

There is the possibility of starting your own business. Many people have hobbies that they could turn into a profitable business but most don’t know where to start. I, for instance, enjoy woodworking. I would love to be able to build furniture and make a supplemental income selling it. But that contradicts my desires to travel and spend time with my family.

That led me to investigate starting my own online business. There are many opportunities available, several of which will even custom build a website, http://www.pluginprofitsite.com/main-6279 is one example.

I also discovered the key element to look for in an online business is residual earnings. That is, when a customer signs up for a product or service, that sale will generate a commission every month as long as the customer continues that service.

Another element in being successful online is to take advantage of the discussion boards and experiences of other home based entrepreneurs. I have found a great source in the International Association of Home Business Entrepreneurs https://www.moreinfo247.com/8813721/iahbe.

There is a very steep learning curve involved with starting your own business. The challenges can be great, but the opportunities are even greater.

These are not get rich quick schemes. The will take work to develop your business. But if you are looking to create a continual stream of income to achieve your retirement goals start planning now. Take advantage of the opportunities available on the internet and use the advice of others who have succeeded.