Browsing Category: "online business"
Is Running an Internet Home Business Right for You?
At this point in time, it’s really no secret to anyone that owning your own internet business can be highly rewarding. But what most people don’t consider is that it can also be a major pain in the butt. If you aren’t sure whether or not starting your own online home business is right for you, then you have to consider the major pros and cons, and really think about whether or not you can do it.
Running your own business can certainly mean a lot of wonderful things for you. There’s no doubt that being your own boss can provide a lot of freedom, and virtually no limit to the amount of money you can earn if your business really takes off. Also, once you have your income streams going strong, you can take time off whenever you want to enjoy the fruits of your labor, which makes taking family vacations much easier.
However, it’s certainly not all fun and games. Far from it actually. There are some major cons to running an internet business that you should consider before starting up. If you aren’t a self starter then running your own business definitely is not for you. Being your own boss means setting your own schedule and meeting your own goals. Nobody is looking over your shoulder to make sure things get done.
Without a doubt, one of the most difficult parts of having your own internet home business is the money situation. It’s often impossible to know exactly how much money you will be making from month to month. And for your first year or two, it’s highly likely that your profits will be very low. You might even lose money for several months at a time before ever seeing any kind of profits.
You definitely need to plan ahead for some potentially tough financial times before diving into a home business. It would be wise to want to save up at least 6 months income before even starting your own internet business. Unless you plan to keep a day job in the beginning, which is probably a good idea.
Yes, it is obviously hard to ignore the benefits of starting your own online business. Being your own boss, making your own decisions, setting your own schedule, and being in control of your own income are all appealing to almost anyone. But you need to be honest with yourself and decide whether or not you can handle the stress of running a business, or if you even have the motivation to keep going through all the tough times that surely lay ahead.
While the pros of running a home based web business may be appealing, if you are not cut out for it, you will definitely regret the decision somewhere down the line. Take the time to truly examine your personality, financial situation, dedication, and so on. Then, sit down and figure out if running a business is really for you. Trust me; you will thank yourself for it later.
Motivating Yourself to Build an Online Business that Can Buy Your Freedom
What are you going to be doing over the next year or two that has a significant impact on your life?
Would you like to build a business, one that helps you to buy your freedom, such that you no longer have to work at a regular job?
What if you could work on such a business in your spare time, and that business was paying you $1,000/month at the end of two years?
What if you quit your day job, put only 20 hours each week into your business, and then grew it to $2,000/month in income?
What would your life be like if you could earn several thousand dollars per month with only an investment of an hour or two each day?
I can tell you what your life would be like, because I have achieved the legendary four hour work week.
Life is awesome when you own a lean online business. It is almost like being on a permanent vacation, where you only work on something when it gets you excited to do so.
That may sound like a completely impossible fantasy, but it is actually not that complicated to achieve.
While the plan to build passive income is relatively simple, that does not mean it is easy to execute. There is a difference. However, let me show you just how simple it can be to achieve the four hour week and thus buy your freedom back from society.
A simple business plan
Create a single website. Just one.
Oh, I know…. conventional wisdom dictates that everyone needs to diversify, lest they risk losing their online income that they have worked so hard to achieve.
Let me tell you a secret though: Building authority and link juice for a website is tough.
It’s so tough, in fact, that I strongly urge you to only try to do it once. You’ll understand why when we look at the promotional strategy.
I would also urge you to choose a topic for your website in which:
* You have at least some working knowledge or expertise.
* The products or services being advertised around your topic cost over $100.
In other words, choose a profitable topic for your website that you can write about with real authority.
You can determine profitability by looking at existing websites based on your topic. What are they advertising? How much does it cost? If the cost is very low, move on and find another topic.
If you have a team of writers working for you, by all means, start several websites. But if you are going to be the only one publishing content on your website, I would urge you to just start a single site and put all of your energy into it.
A simple content strategy
Create articles for your website that are:
* Detailed, in-depth, and insightful.
* Original, with a depth of knowledge that goes beyond what is already available on the web.
* Useful to the audience in a specific way. Consider including action items that the reader can implement directly.
Thoroughly research the internet regarding your content and identify the absolute best information currently available. Your job is to create a website that is superior to what you find.
Each article you publish should explore slightly different ideas and concepts regarding your topic. Each article should target unique long tail keyword phrases in the post title.
Quality of content must remain extremely high. That said, volume matters as well, and publishing three articles daily is ideal.
Balancing volume and quality is tough. Publishing one quality article per day will result in slow growth. Publishing three per day will result in exciting growth within a year or two.
A simple promotional strategy
Build relationships with other website owners in your niche, with the goal of landing a guest post some day.
That’s it. That is the entire promotional strategy. Very difficult to do in high volume, but take your time and keep plugging away at it. Websites need time to age anyway.
There are dozens of ways to manufacture cheap links and give your website a quick boost in the search engines. All of these “cheap” methods are losing their effectiveness over time because the search engines are always improving at measuring real trust and authority.
The simple way to promote your website is to build real trust and authority. You can do that by building real relationships and creating amazing content.
Your promotional strategy hinges on having premium content. No one wants to link to a poor quality website. No one wants to publish a guest post that is anything less than premium quality. Therefore, an important part of your promotional effort is to focus on creating amazing content–both on and off-site.
Simple but not easy
I built a profitable website and sold it for six figures by:
* Building a single website in a profitable niche.
* Publishing lots of quality content–around 1,500 articles total.
* Promoted the site with real relationship building and guest posting.
Looking back, it was dead simple. I published helpful articles every day and did a bit of promotional work. The promotional work was probably only five percent of the effort, while creating the website itself was ninety five percent.
Anyone can do this with almost zero overhead and only a consistent time investment on their part. The question is, who will do it, given that it is so difficult?
What about you? Are you motivated to purchase your freedom by building a simple internet business?
How Can I Increase My Site’s Sales?
Here are some tips for how to increase your site’s sales with site acceleration and other useful tactics!
* Have a good SEO campaign
People need to be able to find you online so that they can go to your website, so pretty much all marketing campaigns these days use a search engine optimization program where they pay money for third-party companies to place links on websites.
One of the first mistakes many inexperienced marketers make when marketing a product that will benefit from SEO is that they try to go as cheap as possible. All link building companies are the same, they think. They do a Google search for SEO companies and find one in India that will give you a backlink for fifteen bucks. All goes well for a few months. Then, their site suddenly disappears from Google. After a few days of research, they find out that they’ve been blacklisted from Google and removed from the search index.
* You get what you pay for
Something that sounds too good to be true usually is. If you hire an outsourced company with writers who barely speak English, they’re only going to be able to get backlinks onto spam blogs. Google is pretty good at figuring out which blogs are spam blogs. Usually there are a few networks of blogs that trade backlinks with other spam blog networks, creating what is called a mutual admiration society.
On the other hand, SEO companies with native English-speaking writers get links on websites with actual human readers, and write articles that appear more genuine to robotic crawlers. If you find a really good company, they could even write posts with content geared toward lead generation, so you get more leads from the SEO produced by the links in the posts as well as from the posts themselves.
* Use site acceleration
Most potential leads are lost within eight seconds of clicking on a link, so you have at most eight seconds to convince somebody that your landing page is worth reading. Even if they’ve already bit the hook in your meta description and your header, they’ll still click back or go to a different site the vast majority of the time.
What this means is that people get impatient quickly when your site doesn’t load. This was less of a problem in the 56k era when people were used to waiting for a site to load, but now people are less tolerant since they don’t have to wait for sites to load very often. Tablets present another problem since people can just swipe back and don’t even have to move their cursor to their browser’s up arrow anymore. Plus, even if people do wait, they will be frustrated with having to wait for so long, so they are less tolerant of a landing page that doesn’t immediately catch their interest.
Stop Making Business Decisions Based On How Nice Someone Is!
This post was inspired by a thread on one of the internet marketing forums I moderate. People are arguing about the legitimacy of a certain program and the owner of it. There are some people calling it a scam and others defending it. However, one thing that stood out to me is that some of the people defending it are doing so based on the argument of how “nice” the owner apparently is even though they haven’t actually joined or have any real inside knowledge about it. If you ask me that’s about the worst way you could possibly make a business decision.
If you really think about it for a minute you will see that it is in the best interest of any scammer or shady business person to be nice and come off as a great person. That’s how they get you to trust them and ultimately give them your money or time, or whatever they are after. If they walked up to you and said, “Hi my name is John Doe, I am a total asshole and nothing but a scammer” — you wouldn’t be stupid enough to join their program or send them your money.
Instead they come off as very nice, helpful, legitimate and having your best interests in mind. Therefore, you trust them and defend them when someone calls them out for doing something shady or for flat out being a scam artist. That’s how they lure people in and give them a sense of security. They want you to think they are the greatest person in the world.
I’m not saying the particular internet marketer and program being discussed in the forum thread that inspired me to write this is a scam. I don’t know because I haven’t looked into it other than what is being said there. My point is simply that overall you should never get into a business, program, opportunity, or anything else just because the owner or someone else high up in the organization is a nice person.
Do plenty of research and get real information from people who have nothing to gain by giving it to you. Always make a truly informed decision before spending any money or time on any sort of internet marketing product or business opportunity. And don’t defend something unless you have actually joined and know firsthand what you are talking about. A nice owner doesn’t make something legit.
A Few Pieces of Internet Marketing Advice Every Newbie Should Read
When you are new to internet marketing then you will usually be called a “newbie” by the more experienced marketers. It’s not a bad thing it’s just the way it is. And if you are a newbie then I am sure you know that you have a lot to learn about online marketing and there’s a long journey ahead of you. As you begin your quest to learn how to make money online, you will find an incredible amount of information and resources. Some of it will be very beneficial to you but a large amount of it will be completely useless crap.
To help you start in the right direction toward success, I am going to give you a few pieces of internet marketing advice in this post that every newbie should read.
The first major piece of advice I can give you is to watch out for scams. There are plenty of very helpful and totally legitimate internet marketers out there but there are also a lot of scammers who are just waiting for a newbie to fall into their traps. As a general rule, if something sounds way too good to be true then it probably is, so don’t fall for the hype. You aren’t going to get rich in a month with little or no work, so run far away from anything that promises you will. Always do plenty of research on something or someone before sending any money.
The second piece of advice I have for you is that you need to be prepared to be very committed to your internet business and ready for a lot of work. Yes, internet marketing can be a lot of fun and you can make a lot of money doing it without breaking your back or enduring the corporate grind. However, that does not mean that you don’t have to work hard or put in a lot of time and dedication to it. You will have to work hard if you want to become a successful internet marketer. It’s going to be a while before you can sip mai tais on the beach while the money keeps rolling into your account. That is a fact!
The third thing you should remember is that you need a plan. This might be the most important of the three. Taking the plunge to become an internet marketer is a huge step in itself but trying to build a successful online business without any sort of plan is a bad idea. Your plan should be filled with short term goals as well as long term goals, and how you will achieve them. It can be modified as needed along the way but sticking to it as closely as you can will yield the best results.
Okay, now you have 3 very important pieces of internet marketing advice to remember. As a newbie it is very easy to fall for scams, not be committed enough, and forget about a plan. Don’t make those mistakes! Your online business will become successful if you follow this advice and stick with it even when things get tough.
