Work at Home Based Business Blog

Work at Home Based Business

You are here because you either want to know what a work at home based business is or you want to find one. I am going to explain to you what a “work at home based business” really is and tell you the similarities and differences between a home based business and a work at home job opportunity. They are not exactly the same thing even though many people think they are.

Let’s look at some similarities and differences between working at home and running a home based business.

When you have your own home based business then you are obviously working at home while running it. So, in that regard they are very much the same. However, a typical work at home job means you will be working for a company or another individual. This is basically the same as going to a regular offline job every day except you get to do it at home.

You should never pay to work at home for a company or an individual. They should be paying you, not the other way around. But a home based business opportunity is different. You will almost always have to pay to join them. It might be a onetime fee or a monthly fee but either way it will cost you.

You have your own online home based business if you do one or more of these things to make money…

* You make money at home by selling products. These can be products that you created yourself or products you are selling as an affiliate.
* You earn money online from selling (flipping) websites or blogs that you have created or purchased and fixed up.
* You make money from selling adverting space on your websites or blogs.
* You make money online by selling articles or content that you have written.
* You make money with Adsense on websites or blogs that you have built and got ranked highly in the search engines.

There are certainly other ways that you can make money at home online which would constitute you having your own online home based business, but the ones listed above are the most popular methods. Basically it boils down to if you make money from your own websites or blogs, or by selling something that is created by you then you have your own online home based business.

You have a work at home job if you do one or more of these things to earn money…

* Someone else pays you to create something for them for a specified amount of money.
* Someone else pays you for writing articles, blog posts, advertisements, sales copy, information products, or other content for them.
* You get paid by someone else for building or designing web sites for them.
* You get paid for taking surveys, reading emails, posting in forums, clicking ads, filling out free offers, or performing other similar tasks.
* You do anything else for someone where they pay you for your time and work.

As with the home based businesses, there are other ways you can earn money that would constitute you having a work at home job but those listed above are some of the most common. Basically you have a work at home job if someone else pays you to do something for them.

Do you see the differences between the two?

It comes down to whether or not you make money from the sale of products or services. If you do then you have your own online business. And if you are getting paid by someone else for a service you provide, you have a home based job. There are exceptions to this rule but that’s basically the way it is for the most part.

When you own a home based business you make money doing things that benefit you and your business. You do keyword research and build your own websites. You do your own marketing and advertising. You make money from your visitors and customers. You are in control of how much time and effort you put into building your business and how much money you can potentially make from your work.

For example, if you write your own information product (ebook) then build a website and write a sales letter to sell it, then you have created your own business product. You will then market it using various internet marketing techniques and hopefully a lot of people will buy it. This is part of your own business and everything you do for the product benefits you. How much money you make from it mainly depends on your own efforts and you can continue to earn from that product for years.

On the other hand, when you have an online work at home job you must work the hours needed in order to complete the task you are getting paid to do for someone else. You will do the work and then give it to your virtual “boss” so they can use it for whatever they needed and pay you for it. You are helping them build their business, not yours. As soon you are done and get paid for your work, you will no longer make money from whatever you did. You have to find another new “job” to continue making money.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both but I highly recommend starting your own home based business rather than doing work at home jobs. The reason is simply because you must have your own business if you really want to create financial freedom for yourself and continue to do so into the future. You will not get rich doing work at home jobs because you will always have to keep working and completing tasks for someone else to get paid. You can only work so many hours in a day and you can only earn so much for your work. There’s a low ceiling on how much money you can earn from work at home jobs. You have a lot higher income potential as well as leverage and options with a home based business.

Now is the time for you to sit back and really think about how you are making money at home online. Do you have your own home business or do you have a work from home job? There’s certainly nothing wrong with doing work for someone else and getting paid for it. However, if you are worried about your future or want to create financial freedom for you and your family, you really need to get started on your own online home based business right now!

The next time you are looking for “work at home based business” you will know that phrase is actually two separate things combined into one. You can do both or you can choose a side. You now know where I stand on the issue.

What Do Horses And Carts Have To Do With Internet Affiliate Marketing, Anyway?

Have you noticed something that all the top Internet business marketers have in common?

Yes, of course they all make a lot of money, and quite a lot of it from affiliate marketing commissions. However, more importantly than that, they have all created their own unique brands and products.

In contrast to the leading marketers, you will find that the great majority of Internet business marketers try to make money exclusively by selling other people’s products. The problem with this approach to Internet marketing, however, is that it puts the cart before the horse. The most successful Internet business entrepreneurs know that it is much better to have the affiliate marketing sales cart driven by the horse of unique products with the owner sat prominently in the driver’s seat for the purposes of personal branding.

You see, the problem with focusing solely on affiliate marketing is that that is what everybody else is doing. You only have two search the web for one or two leading affiliate products to realize  there are far too many Internet marketers out there who think the key to success is selling other people’s info products or business packages. Unfortunately for them, if you want to succeed with internet marketing you have to begin promoting yourself and producing products and services of your own.

It need be no more difficult to produce your own product than it is to write a short report. Anybody who has been working in a particular field any amount of time will have a fund of insights and ideas to offer. Once you have written a report you can turn it into an e-book and promote it as your own product.

Even if you use it as a free incentive to get people to join your list, the very fact that it is a unique product that you have produced yourself with your name on it will give you an advantage over much of the competition. It will help you to brand yourself as an expert in your field.

But you don’t need to stop there. Once you have turned one report into an e-book, begin to plan your next e-book project, or online training course.

The next step could be to make a video version of your e-book. You can post the first video on your website to promote the whole course.

These are just a few ideas for creating your own unique products if you don’t yet have any of your own.

Now that you have something unique to offer, you will find that you have a more solid platform from which to promote affiliate products to generate extra income for your business. That is a much better way to think about making money with affiliate programs. Your primary income should come from your own product (the horse) and your secondary income can then be much more easily generated from affiliate commissions (the cart) generated from follow-up sales, just as a cart
follows a horse.

Remember, it always pays to promote yourself first and other people’s business second. That is why you need to be visibly in the seat as the driver of your Internet marketing “horse and cart”…

Here’s to your whipcrackin’ success in 2010.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

David Hurley

Best Internet Marketing Strategies

Increase Online Business Earnings With The Long Tail

If you’re like many online business owners today then you’ve set up your internet presence within the framework of a blog.  This is a smart move because, as any savvy internet marketer will tell you, blogs tend to perform better in the search engines than static sites.  This is due to a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the major search engines place a higher value on sites that offer new information on a consistent basis.

If your business model is centered around generating revenue with contextual advertising or affiliate programs then you may already know that churning out a large volume of posts and information is vital to increasing your profits.  It is true that you can still earn a decent amount with only a handful of high-ranking posts that target highly-searched keywords, but experienced bloggers know that going after so-called “long tails” is also worthwhile.

By going after “long tail” keyword phrases I’m referring to those which tend to be three words or longer and have what could be considered relatively low search volume.  They are more obscure terms that are easier to rank for but deliver less revenue because few searchers use them when looking for information.  Thus, ranking highly for “cheap platinum wedding rings” is much easier than ranking for “wedding rings”, though the latter phrase might see a hundred times more search engine traffic than the former.

Essentially it comes down to two different strategies.  Either you can write huge numbers of posts that target long tail terms or you can focus on targeting more popular keyword phrases with less frequent posts.  Each has its pros and cons, but I feel that the long tail is overlooked much too often.  By using the long tail approach you can worry less about having to earn inbound links, and focus more on simply pumping out consistent and useful content for your site.  The challenge becomes not so much fending off competitors but rather finding the motivation to write one or more informative posts per day, which in my book is a pretty good trade-off.  Of course I’m not saying to ignore keyword phrase volume altogether, but it might be a good idea to think about zeroing in on phrases that might only draw a hundred visitors a month instead of ten thousand.  You can make up for it with volume.

As I said, this might not be new information for some online business owners, especially those who earn a living with contextual ads or affiliate programs.  I have noticed, however, that people who use a blog as an ecommerce platform tend to be less disciplined about generating site content.  They tend to be satisfied when all their product pages and posts have been published, and they completely lose sight of the benefits that consistent blogging can provide them.  In essence, they might as well have a static site, and this fact seriously limits their earning power, even if they’re pursuing one of the best online business ideas.

When I approach these folks and inform them that they are not leveraging their blogging platform to its full potential they usually complain that they don’t know what to talk about.  For these people the concept of the “long tail” has either been forgotten or discarded, but ignoring it is a huge mistake.  If you have an online store that was built using Wordpress, Typepad, or any other blogging platform then you have an enormous opportunity to take market share simply by coming up with weekly or daily fresh content!  If you’re trying to figure out how to make a lot of money with your online store then you should know that you can greatly expand its reach by adding more posts to capture more potential business.

Let’s say, for example, that you sell yard signs via your site.  You could talk about everything from how to keep yard signs clean, to how to design it for maximum impact, to what qualities to look for in a sign maker.  The possibilities are endless.  It’s not even so important that each post tackles a major concept or issue; you just need to churn out as much content as humanly possible in order to capture as much of the long tail as you can.  This way there is less pressure on you to rank #1 for “yard signs” because the hundreds of other posts on your site are combining to pull in a huge amount of targeted traffic on their own.  It’s really just a matter of going wide or going deep.  Ideally, you would do both, but it’s easier in the beginning to rank for the long tail keyword phrases, and then you can go after the “big fish” later on down the road.

Stop Chasing Shadows and Make Money!

The title might give you a clue to what’s coming here and it isn’t pretty or even very nice, but unfortunately the truth often stings and this is a truth that really can’t be ignored. At least not by anyone who is actually serious enough to want to make money from the time they spend online. What is this latest revelation to put a dent in the vast majority of wannabe Internet marketers?

Its all about chasing shadows.

By that I mean latching on to this or that latest, most innovative idea that some self styled money making guru has put out in the hope it’ll go viral and make them a lot of money off the backs of all the headless chickens who will follow them blindly down a blind alley. Its a shame but a truism nonetheless that people will follow where someone they see as an expert leads. Even if they lead them to certain disaster, which is what most of the gurus tend to do to their flocks.

The trick is to recognize a shadow when you see it!

They are all around and most of them promise a lot while delivering little or nothing. The old saying “if it looks too good to be true, then it probably is” should be uppermost in your thoughts when confronted with a “great idea to make money online”. Chances are, that “great idea” will make money for its creator but will leave you spending a lot of time chasing that particular shadow in circles and not making any money from it yourself. That wasted time would have been better spent working on your own long term income stream that you know works because you have actual proof it works. And I don’t mean some hyped up sales page statistical chart which is probably faked or doctored in some way to make it look highly favorable. Like “I made $3,000 in a week” should really read, “I worked my ass off for two years solid and eventually one week I made $3,000… but my average is closer to $300…”.

Ok, that’s the reality of working online. Most people who do make money, only make an average amount and often its just enough to consider it a working wage. But if you can get to that stage, you can truly say, hand on heart, that you make money online. Because you do and you are living off it! Then you are at least qualified to show others how you do it, if you want to that is.

Think about this.

If you really did find a working formula that made you, say $1,000 a week online on average and it kept producing income no matter what, would you want to sell that idea to a bunch of noobs for $47 a pop and expect to retire on the proceeds? No way, man! It does not compute. It does not add up. And it does not make any sense to do that. I certainly don’t go shouting from the rooftops how I make my money online. Hell, I don’t want the competition taking a slice of my pie and neither would anyone who really does make good cash online.

So what does that tell you about 99% of all the “golden opportunities” that are rammed in your face every time you surf for ways to make money online? Yep, they’re not what they seem. They are shadows and if you go chasing them you will be disappointed.

So the moral of this article is to find something that works for you and work hard at making it work. Its the only way to truly make money online, as there are no free lunches and shadows are fleeting at best. Good luck and I wish you every success.

Terry Didcott

Make Money from Twitter for Free

Make Money Tweeting

Yes, it’s true; you really can make money on Twitter for free! I am not a big fan of Twitter at all. In fact, I usually tell people not to waste their time on it and I rarely use it myself. I definitely don’t think it is good for marketing an online business, which seems to be what most people try to use it for. So, in that way, I think Twitter is useless for making money online.

However, I have found a way to make money from Twitter without really doing anything and it’s 100% free. There’s a website called Ad.ly that is basically just a middleman between “Twitterers” and Advertisers.

They match you with potential advertisers based on your account settings. Then, they send out one tweet per day (from your account) from advertisers that you approve. You set the price that per tweet that the advertisers pay. They even suggest a price point for you based on your account just in case you don’t have a clue what to set it at.

It’s all incredibly easy to set up and only takes a few minutes. And as I already stated, it’s completely free. Once you join you really don’t have to do anything else except approve advertisers and accept/deny tweets. Very simple and almost entirely hands off income!

Three simple steps for getting started:

1) Create an Ad.ly account and authorize via twitter. Takes about a minute and it’s free.

2) Accept or deny the advertiser’s message from your admin dashboard when they come in.

3) Ad.ly delivers the message into your Twitter feed and you earn money.

This is the first “make money tweeting” system or any other “make money on twitter” product or service that I have EVER recommended. And there’s a good chance it will be the last.

Anyway, I am not one for hyping stuff up too much. You probably won’t get rich or even make a lot of money doing this unless you have a zillion Twitter followers and advertisers are willing to pay you big money. But it is an easy way for almost anyone with a decent amount of followers to make some extra cash. Give it a shot: Ad.ly