Home Based Business Success

Here is exactly how to work online from home. You need to follow the following steps, which are, truth be told, much the same as beginning an offline business. There are just certain things you can do when working online that are either far less expensive, much faster to do, or both when you're working online than when you have a traditional business.

How to Work Online from Home – Step 1

Find your target market. The importance of this step cannot be understated. One of the key mistakes made by Internet marketing beginners, and too many business beginners of all types, is that they find a product or service they like and decide to market it. That's great, but if you like mud hut remodeling, your market is going to be small, poor, and without Internet connections. Not a good choice for your online business.

If you want to work online from home and be successful at it, you must first research the market. That means find a market that is hungry, better yet, starving, for something, then feed them exactly what they want. That is the largest secret to success in business, weather online or off. After your preliminary research you want to determine one other thing; how much competition is there in your market? While you can make large amounts of money in any hungry market, choosing an under served market is much better, especially if you're just beginning your work from home journey. Once you've found your target market you can proceed to step 2.

How to Work Online From Home – Step 2

Once you have a hungry target market you can begin step number 2; find something to sell them. You can choose a product or service, physical or virtual. You really have a few key decisions to make in this step.

●      Do you want to market a product or service?

●      The advantages of a product are that once it's created it can be sold by the creator or any one the creator gives selling rights to for as long as the marketing is successful. The disadvantage is that it has to be created, and if physical, stored and distributed.

●      The advantage of a service is that it doesn't have to be created. The vendor (you, the online business owner) can simply begin providing the service to clients. Examples of popular services that people that work on line from home online provide are web development, search engine optimization (SEO), marketing, business and/or marketing consulting, copywriting, and accounting / financial planning.

1. Do you want to develop your own product or market someone else's?

●      Pros of developing your own product -

●      Your own product will give you complete control of every aspect of it, including pricing strategy, advertising and marketing strategy, and the content and function of the product itself.

●      Your own product will allow you to retain as much of the profit as you want. You can keep it all or trade some of it away as an incentive for others to market your product. There are many examples of successful marketers giving lucrative commissions if they are selling digital or virtual products. In fact this strategy, affiliate marketing, is one of the proven paths to online marketing success (from either side).

●      You own it in its entirety. This is the most important aspect of creating your own product. All the other advantages flow from this.

●      You build the customer list, potentially one of the most valuable parts of your business, especially if you decide selling is part of your exit strategy.

●      You have the ability to begin with very limited start up costs, but typically there will be some marketing costs.

●      Cons of developing your own product -

●      It takes time to develop your own product

●      You may not have the expertise or writing skill to develop your own product

●      You have to deal with customer support issues, such as customer service calls, returns, and refunds. This can be expensive and time consuming, depending upon the type of product you develop. There are ways to mitigate much of this, such as automating much of the CS process and overdelivering content to minimize returns, but such things can never be completely eliminated.

●      If it's a physical product(s) you have warehousing, inventory, and fulfillment issues to deal with.

●      Some of the disadvantages of developing your own product can be mitigated by outsourcing if the funds for doing so are available. For example, you can outsource the actual product creation if you've found a hungry market but lack the expertise to develop a quality product fill their needs. This will result in a quicker time to market and a high quality product.

●      Pros of marketing someone else's product – Basically the advantages and disadvantages are the reverse of selling your own product / service.

●      You have no support issues because you actually don't sell the product(s) yourself, you simply refer customers to the vendors website and are paid a commission on any sales your referrals generate.

●      You have the ability to begin with very limited start up costs, but as with selling your own product, you can spend significant marketing funds.

●      Cons of marketing someone else's product -

●      You have no control over the product you're marketing. Although there are many advantages to just being able to begin marketing without any product development costs or time, the disadvantage of having no control over the products is a major disadvantage.

Imagine spending weeks or months developing and fine tuning your marketing efforts (You have to develop your website(s), advertising, get backlinks to your site, publicity, and any other supporting content, test everything, test it some more, and get any marketing agreements in place that you may have supporting your efforts) only to have the vendor either change the payout (these rarely change for the better), drop their affiliate program, or drop you as an affiliate. Ask any affiliate marketer. This happens all the time, for a variety of reasons.

How to Work Online From Home – Step 3

After you've made the decision about what you'll be marketing when you wok online from home, you can move on to step 3, how to market your product and / or service. It is essential you make an actual marketing plan. This is rarely done by most beginning marketers, who tend to treat online marketing as a hobby, rather than an actual business. Part of this is due to the fact that few beginners have any formal business training. In addition, many beginning marketers just think they'll use their online business to earn a few extra buck and supplement the income from their day job.

This kind of thinking is a huge mistake. With a bit of planning and some vision, your online business can easily relieve you from the daily commute and limited income of your current job, but that will be much less likely if it's not treated as a real business. So the bottom line is that you need to develop an actual marketing plan. You can alter it as circumstances change and your business develops, but the important thing is tat you make that marketing plan and address the following questions:

●      What will you be marketing?

●      Who will you market it to?

●      How will you market it to them?

●      Will you advertise? If so, how. You have several choices for online advertising. Many people use pay per click (PPC) advertising. It's fast, and has the potential to drive large quantities of qualified prospects to your website in a hurry. You can advertise on many well targeted web sites and you'll only pay when someone clicks on your add and goes to your website (hence the term pay per click). Its is not as easy as it sounds however and many beginning, and in some cases more advanced, marketers have lost their shirts and their advertising budgets in a hurry by stumbling blindly into a PPC campaign.

●      You can also use banner advertising, where an attractive banner is placed on a website with visitors that you'd like to attract. The disadvantage is that many people have become ad blind and you may not get much good traffic from your efforts. The advantage is that is can be relatively inexpensive. If you get no traffic however, it is actually very expensive on a per visitor basis.

●      Will you use an affiliate strategy?

●      This can be the cornerstone of your success. You'll forgo some profit on the front end, but you will have a large and active sales staff out there selling your product for you. It doesn't take much to see how a few strong affiliates can generate significant numbers for you.

One of the major advantages is that even though they send you the customer, the customer buys your product and is actually your customer, so you will have them on your greatest asset, your customer list. Once they're part of your list, you can market to them for years in some cases. In many cases the value of the customer on the back end is far higher than the initial sale.

That’s why so many Online marketers say “The money’s in the list.”, and they’re right. You’ll have the ability to market new products to your existing customers, which, if they loved your first product, should be an easy sale.

How to Work Online From Home – Step 4

This is the most tedious step in developing your online business. It’s no coincidence that “testing” and “tedium” both begin with the letter ‘T’. Although testing can be boring and dreary, it can easily be the difference between your success and failure online. It’s one of the huge advantages that an online business has over a traditional business. You can easily test between two different ad headlines for example, and have meaningful results in a few hours or days. In an offline business that could take weeks or months, and you may still not get the accuracy that you’d get from using online testing methods.

There are so many variables that you need to test it can easily be overwhelming, especially for beginners. You can get significantly different results from headline changes, ad copy changes, colors, web content changes, different product names, pricing, different payment systems that you accept, and so on. Sometimes there can be little difference, but other times a seemingly minor change can make more than a few percentage points difference. Add a few of these “minor” changes up and you can easily see 50% - 100% increases in sales. You can also significantly lower your ad spend and raise ad efficiency by through testing. If you weren’t doing structured testing you’d either not make any positive changes, or not know exactly why you were seeing improved results.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of How to Work Online From Home.

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 06:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Steps to Starting an Internet Business # 7 – Analyze

One of the keys in any business is to determine where your business is coming from, how you can be more effective at marketing to this group of consumers, and what other markets you can tap in order to grow your business. In order to do these things, you'll need to do the next step in the plan; analyze the results of your marketing. There are several key metrics used by most Internet marketers for analytical purposes.

Unique Visitors –
The number of unique visitors to your web site. Not to be confused with hits or page views.

Page Views –
The number of times a page was accessed (not the same thing as 'hits', which is the number of times files were accessed. A single web page can be made up of dozens of different files)

Referral -
The last page looked at by a visitor before they came to your site. Now we're getting somewhere. This is the kind of information you need to go over with a fine toothed comb in order to maximize your marketing efforts. Are there new traffic sources that you were unaware of? Are your current marketing efforts bearing any fruit?

Conversion Rate -
Conversion is the percentage of visitors to one of your websites or web pages that took the desired action. That can be buying something, signing up for your news letter, filling out a lead form, or any other thing that you want them to do. If you'd like them to stand on their head in front of the mirror, and you have such a great sales page that they actually do it, count that as a conversion. The conversion for your site(s) and every sales page, product, or offer within it will be different. In addition, the conversion rate will be usually be different depending on the traffic source. The more information you have regarding the conversion rate for every page, offer, and product on your site, the better you can calculate CPM.

CPM - Cost per 1,000 visitors.
Obviously this is one of the most important metrics when you're analyzing your traffic. If you know the amount of revenue generated by a visitor to your site, you'll know how much you can pay to acquire a new one and still generate a profit. The thing to be aware of is that traffic from different sources will usually generate different CPM figures.

For example, traffic to your sales page from your forum may generate more or less revenue than traffic from PPC advertising, article marketing, or blog posts. This is because different traffic will have different conversion figures and different acquisition costs. The more granularity you can get when determining your CPM, the better, so make sure you know not only where your traffic is coming from.

Location - Where is your traffic coming from?
This is very important, and more important with some types of sites than others. If you have a geographically oriented site such as a local real estate information website, is most of your traffic coming from the area that you're targeting? If not you may have a large number of visitors but relatively few conversions. That can lead you in one of two directions; you can refine your marketing to bring more traffic from the area that you're trying to target, or you can change the scope of your offerings to more effectively convert the traffic you're getting.

Browser / resolution - While this may seem techy and unimportant to many marketers, it's actually very important. You need to be sure that your site is properly displaying in all the browsers that your visitors use, and especially the more popular ones. The same is true with screen resolution. You want your page to be optimized for the more popular resolutions used by your visitors. If you originally made your page to appeal to visitors running 800 x 600 monitors, you're probably losing sales to those running 1,440 x 900, or 1280 x 1024 monitors because some of site's features just won't be displayed correctly. Going forward, keep in mind that most of the new monitors are wide screen in either 1280 x 800, 1440 x 900, 1680 x 1050, or 1920 x 1200 resolutions. Make sure your site displays well in these resolutions so it's ready for the future.

Duration - How long are visitors staying on your site? If you have a site with a 4-page sales letter and the average duration is 30 seconds, the reason your site isn't converting well is that no one's reading your sales letter. You better hire a copywriter and revise the thing, because it's most likely crap. It's the same with any type of site. You can tell an awful lot about how well your site is holding a visitor's interest by how long they stick around.

Average Views - This also called depth, and it's the number of pages a visitor to your site views, or how deep into your site they go, when they are there. If you have a 1 page sales letter site, well, that number is always going to be 1, but it lets you know if visitors are just hitting the page they entered on, then clicking away, or are they seeing more of your content.

There are more analytics, which I'll get to in a future post, but the upshot is that you absolutely need to know as much information about your visitors and customers as possible in order to maximize your marketing effectiveness. There are many packages you can use but I like Sitemeter and Google analytics, both of which are free or have free versions that are very good. Other well regarded analytics used by marketers include Quantcast, Weblog Expert, and Compete. Most web hosting companies also have analytics of some sort you can use. Whichever package you choose, make sure you analyze, so you maximize your site's profits and minimize your efforts.

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 01:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here are the next steps you’ll need to take on your journey toward Internet business success.

Steps to Starting an Internet Business # 5 – In the previous step you found a niche to market to. In this step you’ll determine exactly what you’ll be marketing to your (if you did your research right) hungry niche. You have a few choices. You can either:

A - Find products you can market as an affiliate. Affiliate marketing for those of you that are just looking into the whole Internet business thing, is when a company will pay you money when someone takes a specific action based upon your referral. They can buy a company’s product or sign up for their service by going through a link in your ad or from your website. You can also generate affiliate revenue by referring qualified leads to a company. How you make affiliate revenue is determined by what the company that pays you is looking for; sales or leads.

B -Develop your own product. For most people in the beginning that means writing software, a script, or an e-book that you can sell via download. As you progress you can also create info products that also incorporate physical media, such as books, pamphlets, CDs, or DVDs. In most cases you’ll be rewarded for the extra effort and expense it takes to create, package and distribute the physical products by being able to command much higher prices for them. The hard costs are not that high, so you will make much higher profits. Be advised that if you create crap, you will quickly get a (well deserved) reputation for creating crap and your customer list will dry up.

C - A 3^rd option to profit from your niche is selling products that are drop shipped. If your research indicates that products in your niche are able to be sold for a nice profit, you may want to fid what’s known as a drop shipper. A drop shipper will take an order from you and ship the product directly to your customer. Many drop shippers will even include a packing list from your company, complete with your logo and address, so as far as your customer’s concerned, their order came from you. The obvious benefit is that you’ll not need to stock or fulfill any product. Keep in mind that you will still need to handle returns.
 
One way you can mitigate that risk is to choose products that are unlikely to break and come in few varieties. This will minimize the chance that a customer gets the wrong item. Items such as consumer electronics definitely break or cause customer confusion. I was in a warehouse a few years back and one of my vendors had taken back pallets of TiVOs because the customers either couldn’t hook them up correctly or weren’t properly informed that the device required a monthly service fee. Trust me, you don’t want to be in this position, it gets expensive in a hurry.

D - A 4^th way you can market to your niche is to just create your website, make it full of good, quality content, and put Adsense or some other contextual ads on it. When people click on these ads you’ll be paid a small amount. Typically this is used as more of an icing on the cake than primary revenue stream, though. You’ll have to generate substantial traffic in the right niche before you can make very much money from this business model. If you are getting that much traffic, you can usually more effectively monetize it through other means, such as affiliate marketing or selling visitors you own product(s).
 

No matter what you determine will be your marketing method of choice for your online business, or if you do as many marketers do and sue a combination of methods, you’ll eventually have to move on to:

Steps to Starting an Internet Business # 6 - Driving traffic
This is obviously a supremely important step, because nothing else matters if no one shows up. You’ve got 2 main choices, pay for your traffic or get it free. Most marketers try to excel in both choices.

Getting traffic free is a combination of getting good search engine results and getting linked to by other sites, e-zines and blogs. The links to your site, known as backlinks, are doubly important because not only do the links drive traffic to your site, but they are one of the most important factors used by search engines (especially Google) when ranking your pages. You can get links through a number of strategies including article marketing, asking, joint ventures (JVs) with other marketers, guest posting on other blogs, blog carnivals, commenting on blogs, forum post signature links (these are “nofollow”ed so they give you traffic, but are not used in calculating your search engine rankings), and of course ‘Web 2.0’. The web 2.0 methods are using social sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Digg, del.icious, propeller, Mixx, Yahoo answers, StumbleUpon, reddit, and flikr.

I’m sure I missed some, but you get the point. These are extremely effective at getting you brand exposure and driving traffic. In some niches, the traffic from site as Stumble Upon and Digg doesn’t convert as well into sales as with other sources of traffic, but in some cases there’s so much of it, it doesn’t matter.

The other way of getting free traffic is to get good results in the search engines when people search for words or terms relevant to what you’re selling or offering. As I mentioned you’ll need links in to your site to help get good rankings. The more authoritative the site the link comes from and the farther up the page the link is placed (all else being equal) the more it is worth in terms of search engine ranking. You also want to carefully optimize your keywords and their use throughout your web pages and blog posts, especially the titles, title tags, meta tags and page / post content. I’ve done several posts on getting targeted traffic.

Your other traffic generation strategy is to pay for your traffic. You can do this in several ways, but the most common are to use pay per click advertising (PPC) such as Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) or Google Adwords, or to pay for your links to be placed on sites that would drive the kind of targeted traffic you’re looking for. You can use either paid text links or banner ads.

A few years ago paid text links were all the rage because of their positive effect on search engine rankings in addition to the traffic they generated, but they don’t seem to be as popular for this purpose now, as the search engines seem to have revised their algorithms. In any case, paid text links are definitely not my area of expertise.

If you choose to do PPC advertising I strongly advise you to learn as much as possible about what you’re doing because while this can be one of the most powerful wealth generating strategies on the Internet, and you can turn it on and off at will, you can also lose more money that you can possibly imagine, in record time, if you’re not careful. Get some good books on the subject, such as Perry Marshal’s Google Adwords, and definitely go to the AdWordsExcellence site.

One of the most important changes to have come down the pike with regard to Adwords in recent years is that Google looks at the quality of your landing page. It need to give a good user experience and relate exactly to the keyword in your ad otherwise your quality score will suffer, and your cost per click will go through the roof. The other thing is make sure your ad is relevant and your headline is extremely compelling because one of the other key things that Google uses to determine how much you’ll be charges is the click through rate. The better the click through rate the less you’ll pay per click.

Stay tuned for part 3 of this series on the steps to starting an Internet business.

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 05:09 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Instead of merely working harder, you need to work  smart. The smartest thing you can do in an Internet or any other business is to leverage other people's resources to make money. It's the same weather you're in business online or you have a traditional bricks and mortar (nice old phrase from the '90's) business.

With that in mind, here are the steps you'll need to take in order to start your Internet business and make it a success.

Step 1 to Starting an Internet Business -  Set specific, quantifiable goals. It's not enough to say “I want to make alot of money” or “I want to make enough to quit my current job” Although you may, in fact, want to do both of those things, you'll need to be far more specific when taking this step.  Something on the order of “I want to make $12,000 a month in gross, monthly, revenue by the end of 2008” is more appropriate. The next thing you'll have to do as part of this step is actually write your goals down. It works well for many people to post them in a prominent place, so you'll have a constant reminder of where you're going in your business.

Step 2 to Starting an Internet Business- Resolve to take action. This is important, but in many cases it never gets done. You have to make a resolution to yourself that you will achieve the goals you've set for yourself and your business.

Step 3 to Starting an Internet Business- Determine what action you're going to take -  This is actually an action in an of itself. You will have to actually show some initiative and take action just to determine what action you'll be taking as you begin to move your business forward. Set a time limit on this, lest you suffer from "analysis paralysis". This is a very common problem, as many people get overwhelmed and never actually do anything.

To combat this tendency, break up your requirements into a series of small tasks you'll have little trouble completing. Focus on only one of these at a time. Make sure it is complete before moving on the next. When this step is complete, you'll have a plan of attack that you can follow. Again, make sure you write this down. This plan will actually become the marketing plan component of your overall business plan.

Step 4 to Starting an Internet Business – Take action. This is the most important step. The vast majority of people out there watching game Wheel of Fortune and playing the Lottery, while letting thoughts of wealth run through their minds will be doomed to eternal failure for the single reason that they never actually took any action. They just plain never showed initiative and actually did anything, besides wish for success. Unfortunately for these people wishing won't drive people to your website, yank the credit card from their pocket and fill your Pay Pal account with cash. You actually need to market a product or service to make that happen.

If you just decide what action you're going to take and actually take it, you'll be ahead of 95% of the population that sits on the sidelines thinking rich people are lucky. Well, to a great extent you make your own luck. A moron that does everything wrong, but actually does something stands a far greater chance of becoming a success in their Internet business, than a genius that does nothing.

Step 4a to Starting an Internet Business - Research a niche. In fact you'll probably research many niches before you find the one that you'll start with. How do you research a niche? That's been the subject of more than a few reports books, and special bonus offers, but you use the tools at your disposal on line. For example, there's a little website you may have been to on occasion called Google that's worth it's weight in Gold when you're doing research. They have a tools section with many resources for just such an occasion. In time you'll begin to use more advanced tools for niche and keyword research, such as Wordtracker and Keywordspy to determine exactly which keywords are profitable, but for now you won't need to go to this level of sophistication. That's for a later step in the process.

When researching niches you'll want to look at a number of things. Does the niche receive traffic? If people aren't looking for a solution or showing interest in the niche, your chances of making money in it are severely limited. The key is to find people that are looking for a solution and are willing to pay for it. If you market correctly, they'll pay you for it, or you'll be paid for it by those actually selling the product, but more on that later.

How do you determine how much traffic a prospective niche gets? You can use Google's webmaster tools, such as Google trends and "Top Search Queries" reports, to determine the relative amount of traffic the niche receives. Trends is great because it tells you weather no not the traffic is trending up or down. Other great tools to use for help in this area include eBay Pulse and Technorati.

The next question that you'll answer is weather or not the traffic in this niche is looking for a solution you can provide or help to provide. If people are looking for solutions that include products that can be sold over the Internet or information that you can provide to them over the Internet, than the niche has possibilities.

The next step is to determine weather you can profitably provide the products or services from the Internet. If the people are looking for information, but are unwilling to pay for it, then the niche is probably not worth your time, unless you can find a new angle that people are willing to pay for. The same holds true for products. While many products are successfully sold over the Internet there are some that are not as successful. Niches that concentrate on products with successful track records of Internet sales are the ones you want to concentrate on.

Again, Google can be a help here. Use Adwords tools to find out how much people are bidding for keywords within a niche. Chances are if other business owners are willing to pay a large amount of money to bid on particular keywords, there's a reason for it. They are either completely misguided, or the keywords are making them money. The expensive keywords can point the way to profitable niches, but don't rely on them exclusively because they can't find all the good, profitable niches, they're just  one tool to use for help in this area.

There are two schools of thought on finding a marketing niche for your business. School number one on niches says that you want to find a small, under served niche that you can dominate. The theory here is that if you narrow your focus enough there will be a group of hungry customers that just aren't getting what they need. Since there is little competition for this small, but hungry group of buyers, you can swoop in and fill their needs, while making a healthy profit at the same time.

School two, on the other hand takes the opposite tack. The followers of this school of thought opine that you'll find more success by targeting a huge, proven niche with millions of customers, and just grab a small, yet profitable piece of the pie. Who's right? Well they both are. There are many successful marketers following each strategy. In fact many marketers follow both strategies and market to different niches. Basically, you'll choose between being a big fish in a small pond and a small fish in a large huge lake.

In my next post I'll look at the next series of steps to starting an Internet business. Stay Tuned.

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 06:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

In many cases contractors will be required to be bonded to get a license to ply their trade, but this is not the same as insurance. Such a bond, called a surety bond, merely insures that in the event you fail to complete a contract, the contractee can recover damages from the bond. The bond does not protect you as a business owner, it protects your customer.

If you have a substantial amount of office equipment in your home office, you should at least ask your homeowner’s insurance company to give you a home office rider to protect the contents of your office. In many standard homeowners policies, the contents of you home office will not be included.

Small business liability insurance is very important for most types of small business these days, even if you have a home based business. Should you say the wrong thing you risk a defamation lawsuit, you could be sued for a product you’ve sold, or a customer could be injured on your property. All of these events could be devastating should you be uninsured. Liability insurance will protect you and your business against such a problem. There are many situations where a liability problem could arise that your insurance would kick in to protect you.

If you are a consultant, you could give advice that causes a problem. This could precipitate a lawsuit. One of your employees could damage someone else’s property in the course of business and you would be liable for the damage.

If you run any type of business out of you home that requires you or any employees to drive company owned vehicles during the normal course of business, such as process serving, delivery, contracting or landscaping, you’ll want to get business vehicle insurance. Before you hire a new employee, be sure to have their driving record checked to make sure that they are insurable or that they will not raise your rates too much. This can also protect you against any liability incurred while you or an employee are driving the vehicles. Your standard auto insurance will not cover for business related use in most cases.

If you do contracting work for some companies, they’ll require you to name them as an additional insured on your insurance policy, thereby indemnifying them against damages to the limit of the policy. That way they can be more protected against problems because they are protected by your policy. In that case you better have insurance, because you’ll need to show them a certificate naming them as an additional insured; you can’t just bluff your way through it.

The most important thing for your business is liability insurance. It only takes one slip up by an employee on someone’s property, or an incorrect consulting opinion to cost your business plenty. Typically the most cost effective option is to check with an insurance broker that represents multiple lines and specializes in small business insurance. You’ll get some piece of mind and it probably won’t cost as much as you think.

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 02:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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 .

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 11:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

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.

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 12:34 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 02:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One big mistake made by many entrepreneurs when they’re first getting started is treating their business like a hobby, instead of like a real business. If you want to ensure maximum profitability, long terms success and legally facing the lowest possible tax obligations, you need to make sure you’re structured like a real business, even if you’re a one person show operating out of your spare bedroom. You need a real business structure, separate bank accounts, a support team of professionals for taxes and accounting, and a comprehensive business plan. Making a mistake when initially setting up your business can be a real pain, not to mention costly, to fix down the road.

It is a good idea to protect yourself and your business by setting up your business as a separate legal entity, such as a corporation. This provides some measure of protections against lawsuits, but contrary to popular belief, doesn’t provide complete immunity, especially for small businesses, which tend to be viewed as “closely held” corporations by the law.

In such cases, it can be a relatively easy matter for a good attorney to do what’s called “piercing the corporate veil” and getting access to your assets. That’s why it’s vital to use a good attorney and accountant to determine what the proper business structure is for your business. The business structure you choose will depend upon many things, such as your individual goals, lifestyle, the type of business, where you do business, and your exit strategy.

Make sure you set up separate bank accounts. If you’re going to be accepting credit cards using a merchant account, you’ll have to do this anyway. It’s also needed so you can take checks in the company name. You should have a personal banker that knows your business well. They can be invaluable when it comes to structuring your finances, keeping a smooth cash flow, and securing additional financing. A separate business bank account will make managing your day to day finances much easier.

In small businesses, cash is king, so proper cash management can be the difference between success and failure. If you have high overhead, you can be profitable on paper and still go out of business due to poor cash management. This scenario is far more prevalent than most people would believe. The estimates vary, but a large percentage of businesses that go bankrupt were actually profitable on paper. This illustrates why it is so important to do all that you can to properly manage your cash flow. Such diligence will also make sure you’re in a better position to advantage of vendor specials and discounts when they present themselves. These can do a great job at decreasing your cost of goods sold.

So, weather you’re just getting your home based business started, or if you’ve been chugging away for a while now, treat your business as just that, a business. You’ll make more money, be under less stress, and have more free time, and isn’t that what it’s all about?

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 12:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Starting a home based business is an exciting, yet scary time. You're staring opportunity right in the face, but at the same time, looking at changing your whole life paradigm. For many people that's just not an easy thing to do. If you make the leap you'll get hit with setbacks, frustrations and delays, but the rewards can be so well worth it. Just the excitement of making your first sale, landing your first job or signing your first contract is a rush that, if you're entraprenuerally minded, you'll get nowhere else.

There are many things you must do before you start your business. The most important being your business plan. The plan will lay out all aspects of your business, fmor your sources of financing, your product/service, your marketing strategy, growth plans, resource requirements, and (something often overlooked) your exit strategy. If you are going to seek outside financing, you simply must have a business plan, and if you are going to start a real business, it's is one of the keys to success. Without a formal, written, business plan you are just creating a hobby that may take all of your time, yet make little money. If you do make money, you'll have no plans on how to use it to grow your business, and better yet, how to make even more.

In future posts I'll cover creating business and marketing plans, how to pick the perfect product or service for your business, plus tips and trick for your success. Most importantly, I'll talk about ideas and insight that can make you money, and isn't that one of the real reasons you want to start your home business in the first place? From Internet marketing to running a sales or service business out of your house, you'll find all sorts of gems to help you on the road to business success.

Posted by HomeBusBlog at 05:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)