Home Based Business Success

The question faced by most marketers is “how to get more traffic to your blog?”. After all many niches are extremely competitive these days and without good, targeted traffic, your blog may as well be notes in your journal.

There are some things to consider before you initiate your free traffic generating plan. You could always pay for your traffic, through paid links and PPC ads, but this is about the kind of traffic you get fo’ nuttin’. If you’re starting out inour business with a minimal budget, that's the kind of traffic you need.

Where is your free traffic going to come from? You’ll have 2 main free sources; links from other websites, directories, and blogs, and SERPs. You want to get balanced traffic and not be too dependent on the search engines, who are notoriously fickle. You can be getting great traffic numbers from them one day, and way down in the results the next.

Links are great for two reasons. You’ll get visitors from the link itself, and you’ll get a vaunted backlink, one of the most important things in the algorithms most search engines use to rank web pages. To get targeted links in to your blog there is one tool that I’ve found to be extremely effective; the blog carnival.

Blog carnivals are themed blog events that are hosted by bloggers. In such an event other bloggers are invited to submit their postings to the host blogger, who then posts links to the submitted posts in a post of their own called a carnival. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the potential of such an event, especially for a business owner with a new blog, and relatively few inbound links.

Some carnivals will include any post that’s submitted, while others are extremely picky and only include the best 5 or 10 posts they receive. The great thing about carnivals is that they themselves tend to get ranked fairly highly by the search engines, and you can get traffic from them.

Where they shine however, is that they generate inbound links, and some bloggers have removed the “nofollow” tags from their blogs, meaning that you’ll get the full benefit of said links from the search engines to help increase your search engine rankings. In addition, you can choose the anchor text of the links, allowing you to build search engine rankings for your selected keywords and phrases.

Some of the carnivals have fairly high readership and you can get significant traffic from them if you have compelling post titles. You should also include a brief description of your post, both to assist the host, (although sometimes they’ll not use it, due to the theme of the carnival) and to provide exactly the content you want around your link. You’ll also get to showcase your writing talent and post content, which can help you get regular readership and subscribers, a real boon to your marketing efforts.

The other thing that you must do to ensure high rankings in the search engines is to optimize your posts, including the post titles. I wrote about this in a previous post with regard to search engine optimization. It is key that you title your posts so they read exactly as the keyword phrases people are searching for. There is a more in depth discussion of keyword optimization in a previous post on how to increase targeted web site traffic. The same thing applies to blog post titles as the titles for web pages.

These things should help you get more free traffic to your blog. Good luck and Good Business! 

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 06:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As a business owner, weather you exist primarily in the online or off line space, you absolutely must appeal to all your potential customers in order to maximize sales, profit, and efficiency. Yet many business owners, especially in formerly male dominated industries, completely or substantially ignore women in their marketing efforts.

This mistake can have devastating results to your bottom line. Think about this for a second. 80% of all checks signed in the U.S. are now signed by women. Women also purchase 80% of all consumer goods and own half of all U.S. businesses. They are the most rapidly growing segment of new business owners. That doesn’t sound like a market you’d want to turn your back on.

You may think because you sell auto accessories, consumer electronics or sporting goods you can ignore women as customers. Don’t; that would be a stupid and possibly fatal mistake for your business, because women actually buy, or are key decision makers in the majority of such purchases.

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, since 2003 women have bought more consumer electronics products than have men, so that worm turned a long time ago. In 2005 women purchased $65 billion wroth of consumer electronics, and influenced billions more. According to a survey in Sporting Goods Business, women influence 95% of all sporting goods purchases.

That means that if you have a home business that sells things, and there’s any chance that women are among your customers, you need to be making every effort to cater to their needs and wants, even if you feel that your business is more focused towards men.

How do you make sure your business is meeting the needs of your female customers? Women and men shop differently. They tend to process information differently than do men. When women are making purchasing decisions, they are more likely to ask questions until they feel they have a good grasp on a product, it’s features and benefits (you are selling features and benefits, aren’t you?). Men, on the other hand shop more like they drive. They won’t ask for nearly as much help as they may need to find what they’re really after.

Be sure you design your web site to give your women customers the answers they’re looking for. They’ll reward you by buying something from you. Women tend to be more brand loyal than men, a great thing for your business if you cater to their needs. Women have less tolerance for websites that are difficult to navigate and aren’t well designed and laid out than do men. If they can’t get their questions answered easily, they’ll shop at your competitor’s web site.

You should also tailor your product mix to be sure that your women customers can find what they may be looking for. Do a bit of research if you must, check with you vendors, offer surveys to your visitors and sift through your site logs to determine what products were the most popular to browse and buy.

If you sell aftermarket auto and truck parts, you may think that your business is the last place you’d find women shopping, but aghain, you’d be wrong. A woman is just as likely to be shopping for a Greddy turbo kit or a Dana 60 front axle with an ARB air locker as are men. Well maybe not quite as much, but you get the point.

In fact women buy quite a bit of aftermarket auto parts and accessories. According to the Specialty Equipment Manufacturers Association (SEMA), the industry association concerned with making sure every kid with a Honda also has a muffler the size of a coffee can, nice rims, and a pair of 12” subwoofers, women actually buy less hard core performance parts. What they do buy is alarm systems, floor mats, fog lights, window tinting, audio / video systems. 21% of women in a survey done by trade journal Aftermarket Business reported that they installed all their own aftermarket parts.

The point is that you not only have to meet the needs of your women customers if you’re selling weight loss products, cosmetics, and designer clothes. You have to make the same effort to meet their needs if you’re selling fishing supplies, basket ball shoes, aftermarket automotive accessories, and home theater gear. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table.

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In this business climate, even if you operate a business that has nothing to do with Internet marketing or selling online, it is key that you maximize the targeted traffic to your web site. Simply maximizing traffic will do little good, other than using up your valuable bandwidth. The traffic must be targeted for specific keywords that you want to be found for on the web.

How do you choose the proper keywords, and how do you help ensure you’ll be found for them? There are a few things to do when optimizing your site or blog to grab the traffic you want. Don’t have a blog yet? Get one, and soon. It‘s one of the most valuable marketing tools you can have, for many reasons, not the least of which is the way it can help increase your visibility and ranking with the search engines.

When choosing keywords to target your site for, there are specific things you should look at. First, you want to determine what will have the most value to your business. For example, if you have a business consulting firm, you obviously want to be found when someone does a search for business and consulting related terms, but it goes deeper than that.

Do you have a specialty within your general business discipline? If you operate in the physical space, what about geographical terms? You would do better to be found for people searching for business consultants in your area, if you are set up primarily to do consulting for local businesses.

The more direct your targeting efforts can be, the greater the value of the traffic to your business, and the better you can optimize your web site or blog to rank well for your specific keywords. There are many so-called ‘on page’ optimization techniques you can use to help your site rank well, but before you ever even get that far, you have to start at the top.

It all begins with the name of the page or site. If you choose it correctly, and optimize the title, and then the on page factors, you will have a much easier time of things when you are indexed, ten ranked by the search engines. You want to choose terms that people are actually searching for.

The reasons for this are two fold. Reason number one is that by choosing keywords that people are actually searching for you will obviously get more targeted traffic, simply because there are more people searching for those terms. But the second reason, and the more important one, is that you will provide value to your visitor. After all, if they are looking for a specific term that is what you want to be found for. Your visitor will have higher satisfaction and you will have a better chance of gaining a customer.

When choosing keywords, it pays to be specific in most cases. For example if you provide business consulting services, as in the example above, you would do better to be found for your specialty within the business consulting arena. By segmenting your broad area into a specific niche, you will be found by those visitors that will attach the most value to finding your site. Conversely, you will also be found by those visitors that have the most value to your business, because you are exactly what they’re looking for.

The secret you must know to increase targeted web site traffic - The most important takeaway from this post is this, however. It’s extremely important exactly what keyword phrases you optimize for. You can have multiple phrases, all specified, and all with the basically the same value to your visitors and your business. These can have subtle differences in phrasing, but the phrases can have wide differences in the number of searches that are performed for them, and perhaps even more important, the number of competing web sites that there are that rank for those keyword phrases. Here are some examples of what I’m talking about.

Take this post, for example. I didn’t choose the post’s title arbitrarily. It actually requires research. When doing research for exactly what the title of this post should be, I was confronted with several options. I knew that I wanted to do a post to help home based business owners get more traffic to their web sites and blogs.

What I didn’t know was exactly how those business owners were asking for help when they went to search for it in the search engines. That’s where the research comes in. I needed to determine the exact search terms that were being searched for, and how much competition there was for each. There may be some keyword phrases that have very high search volumes, but if there are millions of other websites out there that rank for those phrases (not an uncommon scenario) I would stand little chance of ever being found for them, no matter how good my content other on page factors was until I had hundreds or thousands of links from other sites pointing to this post (the number of high quality links to your site from other web sites is one of the primary factors used by the search engines when ranking your site’s pages).

The key then is to choose keyword phrases with a relatively high number of searches, but a lower number of other sites that are found when searching for them. As I mentioned above the difference between good phrases and bad ones is often very subtle, and here are some examples of just what I mean.

When doing the research for this post I found the following different phrases were searched for on Google:
increased web traffic

increase web traffic

increase web site traffic

increase targeted web site traffic

boost web site traffic

generate web site traffic

get web site traffic

As you’ll notice, there is very little difference grammatically between some of the phrases. However, the differences between them in terms of how many people searched for them, and how many web sites can be found when searching for them is huge. Here is what I mean. I’ll list those phrases again, followed by 2 numbers; the number of people searching for them each day on Google, and the number of web sites that Google ranks for each phrase.

increased web traffic                            195 / 43,000

increase web traffic                             209 / 42,000

increase web site traffic                               260 / 337,000

increase targeted web site traffic          22 / 22,000

boost web site traffic                           12 / 7,420

generate web site traffic                      9 / 13,100

get web site traffic                              9 / 37,300

Note how some keyword phrases have much more competition, and thus would be much harder to be ranked for than others, even though the differences from a visitor value standpoint would be slight. For example, although there are a comparatively large number of Internet visitors searching for the phrase ‘increase web site traffic’, there are also many other sites that show up in the Google search engine results pages (SERPS). That would make it a poor choice unless you were pretty confident that other factors would allow you to rank well in the results. A better choice would be one of the results that had far fewer competitors, so you would have a chance to actually be found for them.

To choose keywords and phrases that fit these criteria, you’ll need some help, but thankfully there is help to be found. There are several research tools that you can use when deciding on what to name blog posts or web pages. Google has a nice tool, the Google keyword suggestion tool. You can enter a keyword or phrase and it will show you a list of many other related phrases or keywords and how much relative traffic there is for them. You can also see how much advertiser competition there is for the keywords among Google Adwrods advertisers.  

Another one that I use on a regular basis is the free keyword tool from Wordtracker. It gives more detailed information such as specific numbers of visitors, and how many visitors the number one result on Google gives. Yahoo used to have a nice tool the old Overture as well, but it is no longer….RIP.

So, when trying to get the most targeted web site traffic for your businesses’ web site and/or blog, remember, it’s all in a name.

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As with any economic condition, some will be affected negatively by an economic downturn, but there will be great opportunities created for others. It’s your job as a business owner to find those opportunities. You have enough to do just running your operation, so here are some ideas for businesses that do especially well in bumpy economic times. You can focus your business on such opportunities, or if you’re just getting started, use these as a guide (in no particular order). All of these businesses can easily be operated out of your home.

As with any successful business, those that prosper will be those that create value for their customers. When economic times are tough the quest for value becomes even more acute. The demand for certain businesses grows as the demand for others shrinks. Inexpensive luxuries related businesses will tend to do relatively worse in a recession or economic downturn.

For example, selling $5.00 coffee drinks may not be the path to success when people begin pinching pennies. On the other hand, a business helping people pinch those pennies and weather the recession could net you big profits as a home based business owner.

Best Home Based Business Opportunities For a Bad Economy 1
Credit Consultant – This is one business that experiences a huge upswing in demand when times are tough. You can earn handsome fees by helping people through credit problems and getting them on the path back to excellent credit. Help them set up budgets, prioritize their spending, analyze spending habits and credit offers, raising FICO credit scores and basically anything else that becomes a big problem when money gets tight. It can be a great gig; help people and be well rewarded for it, financially and otherwise.

You can also do credit consulting for businesses. For many businesses, their credit is the financial lubrication that keeps their business operating efficiently and smoothes out their cash flow. They’ll benefit from your services with increased efficiency and higher operating profits.

Best Home Based Business Opportunities For a Bad Economy 2
Debt Collection Agency – It goes without saying that when times are tough more people have trouble paying their bills. If you have experience in the credit or collections industry, you can leverage this into a nice career helping businesses ensure payment of their bills is a priority for customers. The reality is that when business or consumers begin having trouble paying their bills, they’ll pay the ones they feel are important, while letting others go unpaid.

A skilled debt collections agency (you?) is invaluable when it comes to convincing these creditors that their client’s invoices should be one of those given top priority. You should have prior experience in this field and be familiar with all state and local laws pertaining to debt collections. You can go at it alone or purchase a franchise.

Best Home Based Business Opportunities For a Bad Economy 3
Low Cost Goods Provider – In a recession or poor economic times consumers and business become much more price sensitive. In fact if times are poor enough, price becomes the over riding factor people use to make their purchasing decisions. If you are a low price goods supplier that puts you in an excellent position to make a profit by supplying needed items at a very low cost.

For home based business owners this is a godsend. Due to the low overhead of home based businesses, they are well positioned to become just such a supplier. Using the Internet for their marketing and drop ship fulfillment centers as suppliers a home based business can create a very large presence supplying goods in any number of needed categories at the low prices consumers and businesses demand during these times. Other considerations typically used to make purchasing decisions, such as service and quality, will become secondary, and price will reign supreme.

If you can be the low cost supplier, yet keep good service and high quality, you’ll be set to retain customers when economic times improve. Such a strategy can set the stage for a strong business now and in the future. Therein lies another reason to keep your overhead low. Every cent you increase your overhead must be accounted for in your price structure, so pinch pennies. If you can make a case for increased ROI, then by all means spend away, but far too many business owners never do any formal ROI analysis. Make sure you’re not one of them.

You’ll typically want to target a market segment where you can get a competitive advantage either in distribution or supply, preferably both. If you can get an exclusive distribution agreement on a product or service with solid potential, you’ll obviously be well positioned to thrive in the marketplace. While such an advantage isn’t essential, it will take some pressure off you as a marketer, because selling an exclusive with built in demand is much easier than having a host of competitors.

How can you ensure you have a competitive advantage? Basically, you have to grow a set. No supplier is just going to call you out of the blue and drop a valued product line at your feet. You have to find a product, or series of them, that is in demand, or would be so if it was correctly marketed, yet currently has limited distribution. It’s usually easier to find this type of product in the specialty arena. Develop a marketing plan for the product line that ensures you are well positioned to take advantage of its growth. Usually you would be set up as the exclusive distributor.

There are two points here.  The first is to make sure that the product / service will be in equal or greater demand as the economy loses steam. The second is to make sure that your marketing plan guarantees the manufacturer or higher level distributor will increase their profits and or sales by implementing your marketing plan. If you can make the case that they’re fools not to implement your plan, you’re half way to that new Hattaras you’ve always wanted.

It won’t be easy to pull this off, but I know several marketers who have done so, and more who are trying all the time. The greater tragedy is that too many people never really implement their plans. You have to not only find the product(s), but you have to develop the plan, then, most importantly, implement it. It’s the action and follow through part that trips up so many people. You have to have persistence, and be prepared to hear about 3 million “no’s” before you make your first deal. But you have to think big, and never give up.

Best Home Based Business Opportunities For a Bad Economy 4Foreclosure investor. Look around you. What is growing as the economy is hitting the rocky road? That’s where you want your home based business to focus. One such candidate for these trying times is in foreclosure investing. The veritable epidemic of foreclosures in some areas presents an opportunity for the astute business owner to capitalize on. It’s not an easy road, but can generate some tremendous profits. You’ll not only need to locate foreclosure properties, but know which to make deals on and which to steer clear of. Purchasing the wrong one could leave you deep in debt, instead of rolling in dough.

Remember, the keys to success in poor economic times are much the same as when times are good, only the products and services differ. You must find those who have an immediate need for a critical solution. The more immediate the need and the more serious the problem they need solved, the great your opportunity as a marketer and business owner. Keep this in mind when plotting your path .

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One of the big benefits to article marketing is that it's free, although it can be a bit time consuming. You'll get traffic driven to your site in two ways through article marketing. People will see your article and then be so compelled by your writing skill and boundless wit that they'll click on your link, eager to discover all they can about you, your product, and your company. The other way that they'll reach your site is through the SEO benefits that all those inbound links confer.

It's well known to all but the newest Internet marketers, and anyone else that  attempts to market products with the help of a website, that one of the main criteria used by the search engines to rank a particular web page is the number and quality of inbound links to the page. From what passes for common knowledge on the web, Google puts more credence on the power of the inbound link than do the lesser search engines, but all seem to use this in their algorithm to some extent. So, all those inbound links let people come directly to your site, but they also help it rank highly in the search engines.

Here are two big mistakes made by Internet marketers and others that use article marketing that will keep you from maximizing both of the benefits you should achieve from article marketing.

The first mistake is to use copy in your resource box that's just not compelling. Although it is supposed to tell about the author, you should really use the resource box to compel visitors to click on your link. Unless you're a pretty interesting individual, your life story just isn't going to do that. Many people use a variation of  “To find out more information on “x”, go to our website URL” That's not much better, although it is a step in the right direction.

A better line would be something along the lines of:

“Discover the secret that's keeping you from whatever, at URL"
or
“Discover how you can easily get miles ahead of your competition (and they'll never know how your did it). Go to URL before we put the secret back in the box."

You need to create curiosity and make your resource box compelling. Make it so that they'll fell as if not clicking on your link will have them really missing out on something important, and don't tell them everything in the ad copy. Remember, you want to create overwhelming curiosity, with a sense of urgency.

The other mistake has to do with the link itself. If you're just using the URL of your website, you're missing the boat on 90% of the SEO benefits offered by article marketing (or any other technique where you get to put a link to your website). People aren't going to search for your website in the search engines. If they already know the web address, they'll just type it in. They'll search for words or terms related to the information they're after. These words or terms are known as keywords, and it's these that you want to rank in the search engines for.

So, how can you help yourself rank for your desired keywords. Well, the way you won't help yourself is to use your website address as your link. The search engines want to see the actual keyword in the link. When you're looking at a link and you see text, but no web address, is an example of what I'm talking about. That text you see is called anchor text, and it's this anchor text that the search engines use when determining what terms to rank your site for. You have to replace your simple web page URL with a link that uses anchor text containing the keywords you want to be found for. When you start using keywords in anchor text instead of just the URL of the web page you'll begin to get the benefit of this powerful, free targeted traffic technique.

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Here are some of my favorite free tools that I use to help me in my business. They may be able to help you in your business too.

OpenOffice – While Microsoft office is a great software suite, there’s no doubt that it costs a pretty penny, and many times it’s these very pennies you’re pinching when you’re starting your business. OpenOffice comes to the rescue by offering a complete office software suite. Not only is the price lower than the Microsoft version, it actually is compatible with their applications, such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel. There are the aps you use everyday. If you grow your business and need multiple licenses, no problem, it’s still completely free. I’ve been using a copy on my office desktop PC for about 3 years and have never had a problem. Check it out at:
http://www.openoffice.org
 

Paint.net – This is a fantastic image editing program. It’s the perfect ap for doing anything you’d do in PhotoShop. For content creation or marketing purposes, it hits a pretty nice home run, and it’s fairly easy to use too.
Get a copy here:
http://www.getpaint.net/

Note Tab Light – This is an impressive, yet free, text and HTML editor. If you still roll your own HTML, this is just what the doctor ordered. I recommend you have at least some familiarity with HTML if you do anything in the online business space.
http://www.notetab.com/ntl.php
 

SmartFTP – When you need an FTP application to upload or transfer files, ease of use is typically one of the more important attributes, after functionality. SmartFTP is easy to use, has great a feature set, and is once again, free. It even gives you success or failure emails so you don’t have to keep watching the file transfer process to make sure everything went through alright.
http://www.smartftp.com/
 

Search Status – This handy little firefox extension lets you know at a glance the Google PR and Alexa ranking any site you visit. You can dig deeper if you want, and find if they’re using nofollow links, check the keyword density,  backlinks, metadata, and more with a couple of mouse clicks. It’s great for checking out your competition’s websites or blogs. It also works to make sure your own site’s pages are up to snuff.
http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

 
Inc. magazine has some great free business tools and other goodies, such as sample letters, forms and documents available here:
http://www.inc.com/tools/

 
Have a great weekend, and here’s to your Home Based Business Success.

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You may have done a terrible job with homework in school, but if you do a good job now, none of your past problems in that regard will matter anymore. Now you can see why choosing your market first was so important. No time to put the cart before the horse, although that’s a common mistake of new home business owners. Too many select a product and then sit around trying to decide who best to sell it to.

If you are doing a service oriented business, such as consulting, choosing a product is a bit different than if you’re marketing info products on-line. In the case of a consultant you are the product and you’re providing a service. Exactly what service will depend upon what the individual customer needs. You may find a niche developing and implementing business processes for contracting firms, or maybe you’re great at helping companies with their marketing strategy.

Your market could be mid to large sized corporations who need technical writing services due to cutbacks in their PR and communications departments. In this case the deliverable product will be dictated by the exact requirements of the department managers you’re working with and how you choose to meet those requirements.

If you’ll be primarily selling products, choosing your product mix isn’t the next step. You need to decide weather you want to sell your own products or sell as an affiliate. Here’s an example:

You could have chosen teens and young adults with acne as your target market. That would be a wise choice, considering the market for acne related products is estimated to be around $2.5 billion! You know that such a market fits the description of a hungry market. Appearance to young adults and teens is incredibly important. That is good for you as a marketer, but even better is that many of the people in this market want their problems solved NOW! That urgency is what really makes the market attractive for you.

Another important attribute of the acne market is the availability of products targeted at it. If you’ve watched TV for more than an hour in the last week, you’ve probably seen ads for 50 acne and skin related products.

Keeping with our acne example, you now have to start the product selection process. Do you want to sell products yourself, or get paid for referring customers to buy from others? In the first case you’d be the merchant, in the second, you’d be an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketing is simply (if you’ve been involved in Internet marketing for more than 2 minutes, you probably already know this, but bear with me) referring customers to other company’s websites and getting paid a commission when they buy from that company. It’s very common and can be very lucrative.
 

You Being the Merchant –

            Advantages –               -More control over the products you sell

                                                -More gross profit

                                                -More control over how you market and sell the products

-The ability to implement your own affiliate program and have other people in addition to you selling your products.

-Unlimited growth potential dictated by your industry, product mix, marketing, and fulfillment capability.

            Disadvantages              -Customer service and support requirements

-Possible inventory, warehouse, and fulfillment (you can use a fulfillment or a drop shipper to eliminate these depending upon what products you’re selling).

-Product returns

-Refunds

-Payment processing and banking requirements

-Higher relative start up and business costs.

With affiliate marketing the advantages and disadvantages are roughly reversed. You have no customer service issues to worry about, but you’ll also make less gross profit on every sale for comparative products in the majority of cases. Affiliate marketing is attractive to many new marketers because the barriers to entry are relatively low. You need no inventory, payment processing, or customer service infrastructure. In fact you only need your computer. Later, you can scale up your efforts by working harder or outsourcing some of your processes.

Affiliate marketing isn’t all green eggs and ham, though. Probably the worst aspect of affiliate marketing is that you have little or no control over the products you’re marketing. A company can decide that their affiliate program no longer meets their needs and abruptly decide to cancel it. You could have just spent months fine tuning your advertising campaign and website, and spent a good bit of money doing so, only to be left with nothing to sell.

This has happened to me. A program that had earned me $4,000 last year was cancelled with 1 week notice near the end of 2007. Now $4,000 isn’t that big of a deal to some of the mega success stories in the affiliate marketing world, but it’s not chump change to me (Yet!). I was left scrambling around trying to fill the void, which I have been so far unable to do with the same level of success. So, product control is very important and should not be underestimated as a reason to consider being your own merchant. Most of the product swill still be supplied by someone else (except if you develop your own, more on that later), but you can usually find another supplier. When a merchant cuts their affiliate program, you have no such luxury.

So, with regard to the affiliate marketing / merchant debate, each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, but you need to decide which way you’re going before you decide before you decide your product mix.

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One way to research market profitability is to look at what markets your competitors are selling to and how long they’ve been selling to them for. Now, you’re not likely to just submit a survey to current or potential competitors and get an answer on this. You have to use other market research tools. One way to do this is to go to websites that cater to your target market and see who is advertising on those sites. Check the Google Adsense or the Yahoo ads running on the sites and who’s running them. That is who you’ll be competing against in the particular market.

Check the history of such ads. Look at the same sites for a week or two. Are the same websites and companies still running ads? If so then there’s a good chance they’re making money on the ad, and in the market. The other possibility is they are using the ads to build a web presence by building traffic, even if they aren’t monetizing it at this time. You should be able to tell by going to their site and seeing what it is they are marketing.

Another way to get great information on a potential target market is to look around for forums related to it. The existence of large and active forums, or smaller ones with passionate members is a sure clue of a market with some interest behind it. The other great thing about forums is it shows questions, problems, and concerns of people in the market. You can tell even more by participating in some of these forums. A bit of creative posting will bring to light what people want solutions for and what they’re willing to pay for.  If you have a market that’s willing to pay for a solution, especially if you are the only, or one of the only solution providers, is pure gold for your business.

Once you’ve been a member of a forum for some time, you can even conduct surveys in some cases. These are invaluable for gleaning information about what potential consumers want and how much they’re willing to pay for it. You will not be able to do this all the time. Quite the opposite is true, but when you can use this technique on a forum, it’s extremely valuable. If you have a website that deals with the market you’re hoping to conquer, you can host a survey there. If you have enough traffic, you can get great information. You can also check out http://surveymonkey.com. They’ll let you design a custom survey and even host it for you. If you have fewer than 100 respondents it’s free, but they can handle much larger surveys for a small fee.

These are but a few of the techniques you can use to research a target market for your home based business. In future posts I’ll look at the next steps on the road to making millions with your home based business. Here's to your success!

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The more specific the steps you take, the better your chances of reaching your goals. You want to focus on an exact step by step plan. The importance of this cannot be understated. Too many home based business owners muddle through their days, never accomplishing their goals. Why? Because they never set any real goals for the day, or any long term goals.  If you have no goals, you will have trouble planning, because you don’t know exactly what you’re planning for. You have to set goals, create a plan to achieve them, then follow the exact steps necessary to make your plan a reality. Along the way you’ll need to have the flexibility within your plan to account for changes in the business environment.

Here are the steps you must take to make millions. Follow them in the order they’re listed. This post will address step number 1. Following posts will detail the additional steps of the plan.
 

How to Make Millions – Step 1
Choose your target market. It’s pretty simple really. You have to know exactly who you’ll be marketing to in order to know what they want, what motivates them to buy, what product or service you ca satisfy them with, and how to deliver what they want once they’ve purchased it. There are other things that are essential to making your first million (or any other amount of money), but your first step will be choosing and learning your target market.

This is yet another reason to create a formal business plan. You should even create formal product marketing plans for each separate line of business, product, or project you are going to develop and take to market. The more narrowly you can define your target market, the better you’ll be able to create an effective marketing plan.

Too many people choose their product first, then try to find a market for it. That’s backwards. If you have defined your target market and have intimate knowledge of it, you can then find or create the perfect product that meets their needs. There are some very important criteria to consider when defining your target market. If your market meets them, you will have a much easier being successful.

To grease the wheels for your success, your target market should have an urgent need for something you have, can create, or obtain, the ability to provide for them in a profitable manner. That’s important. The navy may have an urgent need for additional aircraft carriers, but that’s not something you’re likely to have much luck in supplying.

Markets that need solutions for basic needs or even better, urgent problems, are ripe for you to market products or services to. You’ll typically want to find a large and hungry target market and then find a profitable subset of it, or niche, that you can serve. Your task as a marketer is to provide a quick and easy solution to a consumer’s problems, but first you have to find who those consumers are and what problems they urgently need solved.

How do you find such hungry markets? As with finding out almost anything, it will require research. Bit, fear not, it’s not as difficult as it sounds. There are places you can go to help you gauge interest in a market. Here are 4 ways you can find markets to serve; Amazon, eBay, Google, and Wordtracker. Each has a tool that will give you the most popular searches, or a list of categories that you can check to determine what people are buying and/or selling.

Using Amazon.com to check for large and profitable target markets requires just a check to see what books are selling well in the non-fiction categories. Consumers who are interested enough in certain subjects to drive books on them up the Amazon charts represent a sizeable market. http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/53/ref=pd_ts_b_nav

You’ll also see a category list down the left side of their web page that gives you additional categories you can use to segment your market.

On eBay, you can see what products are selling well because eBay is thoughtful enough to provide a list for you at http://popular.ebay.com/. There you’ll find hundreds of popular market niches you can investigate further to find a hungry one you can target. Keep in mind you are not yet looking for a product to sell, only a market that is hungry to buy.

Google is a fantastic resource because you can see what keywords have high search volumes. Check out http://www.google.com/trends. This gives insight into what people are looking for, and what problems they may need solutions for. After all if they are asking questions, they need someone of provide the answers, weather that’s in the form of information or a physical product. You can position yourself to provide either, so at this stage you need only be concerned with finding a market to satisfy. Later we’ll look at choosing products or services you can market that will do just that.

In the next post, I’ll look deeper into finding a profitable target market and how you can determine which markets are likely to be profitable for you.

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As a small business owner, especially one who operates out of your home, you’ll have to wear many hats. Entrepreneurs have a tendency to do that, sometimes to their detriment. Part of the reason many people have a home based business is for the freedom and independence it provides. Some business owners feel that having employees opens a can of worms they’d rather not eat at this time, so they go it completely alone.

The difficulty with going it alone is that you end up trying to do everything for your business. The problem here is that you’re probably not the best person to be entrusted with every task necessary to make your operation function at peak efficiency. Blow to your ego though it may be, you’ve got to admit there are certain things in your business that other people can do better than you. Maybe advertising, writing copy, and graphic design aren’t your strengths. Perhaps it’s cold calling prospects that you abhor. The point is that we all have certain skill sets. By definition there things a set includes and those it does not.

You should focus on these things you are good at and leave the other tasks to those who can do it more effectively, efficiently, and possibly cheaper as well. That will free up more time to do those things that more positively impact your bottom line. For example, should you spend your time washing company vehicles or prospecting for new business? In most cases the washing of vehicles would be best left to someone who’s not as well compensated.

How about working on your website design vs. writing a sales letter? That would depend upon where your talents lie. If you are great at design but not the most convincing writer, outsource the sales letter to a proven copywriter. You may pay a bit more up front, but end up with a sales letter that has a better conversion ratio, and a nicer looking web site as well.

Analyze all business functions from an ROI perspective. Do you get a better ROI by performing those functions yourself, or outsourcing them? You may love to write, but not be especially fast or effective at doing so. In that case, you may outsource much of your website’s content creation to writers. That would also hold true if you have an article marketing campaign. Can you write effective, keyword rich articles that other site, e-zine and newsletter owners want to publish? Can you do this fairly rapidly? If the answer is ‘no’, then your time would probably be better spent working on sales, strategy, or other operational tasks instead of writing and submitting articles.

Another popular task that can be perfect for outsourcing is customer service. If you’re selling products online using a drop shipper, part of the attraction is that you need no staff for warehousing and fulfillment. You’ll still receive phone calls for a variety of customer service issues however. People will get the wrong order, a product will be defective, or they’ll simply have a question.

Developing a good, long term relationship with your customers is absolutely essential to the long term viability and growth of your business. As your business grows however, the volume of such calls may become overwhelming and detract from other essential business tasks. You have three choices; lose customers (not a good choice), hire someone to take the calls and handle the CS issues, or outsource all or part of your customer service to an individual or firm that specializes in such things. In many cases the best fit for a home based business is to outsource some or all of the customer service function to others, leaving you, as the business owner, free to handle other important tasks (or just play golf and go fishing with your kids).

Outsourcing has been in the news for the past few years, usually in connection with how many American jobs it costs large businesses. There is a whole other side to outsourcing, and it’s one you, as a home based business owner should investigate. You can outsource tasks to those in other countries, such as India, China, or Russia, and many business owners do just that. However, you don’t have to outsource work only to developing countries. You can also outsource to firms or individuals next door, or across town. It all depends on what provides the most benefit to your business in the long term.

Remember, you will lose a certain amount of control when you outsource, rather than performing those tasks yourself or hiring employees to do them. The question is weather or not that loss of control is justified from a business standpoint.

It all comes down to this; you only have so much time, and it should be spent doing those things at which you’re best, while leaving the other tasks to a third party. You will have a larger, more profitable business, and you’ll get to spend more time doing things outside of work.

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