Work at Home Based Business Blog

Archive for October, 2007

Have you ever seen a train wreck? It’s not pretty. Actually, it’s downright ugly. For that reason, I tend to try to avoid them at all costs. Oddly, Internet marketers seem to love train wrecks, especially when they’re right smack dab in the middle of one. Oh, I know, you have no idea what I’m talking about do you. Well, I wasn’t expecting you to. See, this is the kind of train wreck that we’ve all come to accept as Internet marketers. The reason is because most of us, especially the guys first starting out, don’t know any better. If they did, they’d get out of that passenger car as fast as possible.

Okay, I’m going to stop talking all cryptic here and try to explain some of what I am talking about.

When most Internet marketers break into the business, they tend to go to where they think the money is. For the real green newbie, that means heading for the “make money online” niche. This is the niche where the new marketer writes a book on how to make money on the Internet and then tries to sell it. Now, if you can’t for the life of you see what’s wrong with this and why it’s a train wreck in the waiting, let me explain.

First of all, where does this new marketer get his info from? He’s brand new, so he hasn’t actually ever made any money online, yet he’s going to teach others how to do it. Okay, whatever floats your boat. But still, he has no idea what is actually going to make him any money so how does he write his book?

Well, for most of these newbies, they write their book from information they read from…you guessed it…other books. Now, unless they know the person who wrote these books personally and know of their credibility in regard to the subject, they don’t know if this information as any good or not. Still, they take it and put it into their OWN book, passing it off on their own and then hope they can sell it.

Well, this is a train wreck on so many levels that I don’t even know where to begin.

For starters, the info could be erroneous. So the person buying it could be getting something that flat out doesn’t work. Then they put it into action and sure enough, they don’t make any real money doing it. So somebody tells them, “Don’t worry, just write a book on how to make money online and sell it.” They say, “Hey, that’s a great idea.” And the cycle of garbage “how to” books continues, each one telling the other to make money online by writing a book on how to make money online and selling it.

Of course, to sell these crappy books, they have to get testimonials. So what do they do? They go back to the guy who they bought THEIR book from and ask him for a testimonial on his new how to book. Now, not wanting to offend the person, they agree. After all, if they say the book isn’t any good, the person would just say back to them, “But I got this info from what you taught me. If it’s not good then YOUR book isn’t good either.” So the person is locked into giving a testimonial for what he knows is a piece of crap book. Heck, he should know…HE wrote it.

I think you get what I’m trying to say. This train wreck has been going on for so long that it’s a joke. Well, there is a way to avoid this train wreck and that information will be coming in the follow up series to this article. So stay tuned.

And stay out of trains.

Sincerely,

Steven Wagenheim

Creator Honest Income Program

Creator My Secret Articles

Creator 4 Steps To Success

http://www.honestincomeprogram.com/

http://www.mysecretarticles.com/

http://www.stevewagenheim.com/4steps.html

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Hi, I’d like to introduce myself here in my first guest appearance. I’m Terry Didcott and I write rather a lot! You’ll get to better know me and my own special brand of scribblings over time!

Being an avid blogger with a perpetually growing menagerie of blogs, Squidoo lenses and websites, I know full well the importance of promoting those windows onto the various rooms in my creative writer’s mind. There are several methods of getting the word out to the general content hungry public and I’ll cover each of them over a series of posts.

To cover them all in one post will likely take a lot of time and end up being so long it’d probably put you to sleep!

So. what do I mean by comment your way to the top?

Blogs are very special media, in that they allow a two way interaction between blogger and reader in the form of comments. If a visitor to a blog likes what they are reading, they may feel moved to comment on a particular post. If the blogger is enthusiastic about what he does, he’ll reply to the comment. Other readers may also get involved in the conversation and what you end up with is a social meeting place of like minded people who are all able, thanks to the beauty of the comment box, to exchange thoughts, ideas and information.

So a blog can also become a social networking platform.

So far, so good. How does the blogger (like me) take advantage of this?

By getting into the bloggosphere and visiting lots of other blogs that inhabit the same niche, a blogger can not only get a good deal of inspiration and alternative viewpoints on a variety of subjects, but he can comment on other bloggers’ posts.

That has a severalfold positive effect.

1. He becomes known to the blog owner he just commented in - more so if he comments regularly
2. He becomes known to the regular readers of the blog
3. Those readers may well click his link back to his own blog out of interest
4. If the blog is a “Do Follow” supporter, he gets a free, one-way back-link to his blog

Let’s analyze these points a little.

Points 1 and 2 are obvious - networking gets you known and raises your online profile and that of your blogs/sites.

Point 3 is a major benefit, because it means more targeted traffic to your blog. If you write well and your posts are interesting and entertaining enough those people may well become regular readers of your blog too.

Point 4 is the killer benefit. There is a growing number of “Do Follow” supporters and a good number of higher PR blogs are joining the movement.

Note: For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, “Do Follow” is a plugin that cancels out the hard-coded “rel=nofollow” in the HTML of most blogs which effectively blocks the search engines from accrediting you with the back-link from your comments. In other words, “Do Follow” blogs give you back-links from your comments.

This means that newer bloggers have an incredible chance to not only get indexed by the search engines fast by commenting on these higher PR blogs, but they also boost their chances of a higher page rank for their own blogs by creating enough of them from lots of different sources.

This in itself makes it so worth while writing and hosting an excellently written blog and making friends with high PR “Do Follow” bloggers by writing good, relevant, creative and thought provoking comments in their blogs. Because don’t forget, “Do Follow” bloggers strictly moderate their comments and simply won’t approve any old rubbish. Spammers don’t get a look in!

It also helps to be a “Do Follow” blogger yourself - give and take is the buzz phrase here. Don’t expect to receive if you’re not prepared to give in kind. You’ll gain more respect amongst your peers and make a lot of friends along the way to your own blogging success.

Is this a great way to promote yourself and your blog(s)?

You bet!

Terry Didcott

Author of The Honest Way Blog amongst many others!

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There are many signs that say, “This job is a scam!” When I refer to job, I mean the one that has an employer. Here’s a list of what to look for to avoid the work at home scam.

1. If it looks to good to be true, then it usually is. Always go with your gut instincts. If you’re questioning it because something looks fishy or just doesn’t seem right, then most likely it’s a scam. Ask around the various work at home forums or type in your favourite search engine the company’s name+scam.

2. Earn tons of money in a short amount of time. You will see $300-$500+ in just 2-3 hours per day or something more outrageous than that. Doesn’t ask for resume or job skills or experience. Um…NOT! Seriously, if you can make that kind of money, why aren’t we all doing it?

3. Loud, colourful, screaming websites. A lot of hype and not much else. Websites that are the colours of the rainbow, have highlighted words, bold and huge fonts cannot possibly be taken seriously.

4. Training materials or registration fees. This is a sure sign it’s a scam. Legitimate employers do not ask for fees! There are exceptions to this rule such as background checks and equipment required for the job.

5. Free email address. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a scam. Many legitimate employers use a free email address to avoid clogging up their company’s email address.

6. Free webhosting. Many scammers will use free webhosting. I know of only one company who is very legit and for some reason or another uses a free webhosting. With that said, it’s only one I know and the rest well…it does scream scam because if they can’t pay for webhosting, how are they suppose pay you?

7. No contact information. There should be at least an email address, a phone (or toll-free) number or physical address.

8. Poorly written English. This is tip off. Sure sign it’s a scam.

9. Money processing. No. No. No. No. Never accept any jobs that require you to accept payment into your account for transfer later to another bank account.

10. Stuffing envelopes. Again, no such thing.

These are just a few of the signs to avoid. Always do your due diligence, never be desperate because that is when you will fall prey to scams.

To your success,

Sophia
http://www.workathomespace.com

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When talking about search engine rankings many people ask themselves questions like; how many keywords should I put in my anchor text? What is the keyword density that I should have on the page? Should I use short copy or should I use long copy? Can I use flash or not? How many keywords should I put in my “alt” text? Etc…

A general statement to answer the above questions is that “magic numbers do not exist.” The most important thing you can understand as a search engine optimization expert is that algorithms change. Just when you think you understand what is going to make you number one for a keyphrase in a search engine, something could easily change, and you might have to spend months or even years trying to figure the new algorithm.

It is better not to try to reverse engineer the algorithm, do something much easier instead… observe your top competitors. All you need to do is to understand what elements your competitors are using to make them rank in the top positions.

The main elements to getting top search engines rankings are:

- Number, quality, and relevance of inbound links pointing to your site
- Fresh, relevant, quality content (needs to be added frequently)
- Keyword density of your home page or any page you want to rank highly

LINKS, LINKS, LINKS

The first thing to observe from your competitor’s sites is their inbound links. This means the number of sites that have a link pointing to their website. You can easily measure it by going to Google and typing: “link://www.yourcompetitorssite.com”. However do not only do this on Google because they don’t show all actual links pointing to a site. Yahoo and MSN tend to show a lot more of the back links to any given website.

Part of the observation should be not only what the links say, but where the links come from. Think about what the category is that those links come from. If you start to see a recurring pattern, you should start actively searching for links coming from that category.

Some marketers use special software for robotic content creation. They generate thousands of pages with links pointing to their sites. This practice can be very dangerous, as Google will penalize unnatural linking or violations of their terms of service. And what happens is that those links do not look natural. One day one site may have 50 links and the following day have 2000 links, which all say the same thing and come from the same IP address.

If you understand how to observe, this will never happen to you. You will learn how to look at your competitors, and observe how they are getting linked to. Then, just do what they do.

FRESH QUALITY CONTENT

The second thing to observe is how much fresh content the top sites have. Search engines love quality relevant content that is added and updated frequently. You will probably notice that the top sites in your niche have many articles and other quality content, and are continuously adding new content to their sites.

People that surf the web are usually searching for information, so content is the “fuel” of internet traffic. If you want to attract many potential customers to your site, then you need to make sure that you provide enough content which is relevant to their interests. Updating it frequently with more quality content will keep visitors coming back to your website over and over again.

KEYWORD DENSITY

The third thing you need to observe is the keyword density of your competitors. How many times should you repeat your main keywords? In which part of the web page should your main keywords be mentioned? Again, there is no magic number, it’s all about observing and measuring against the top websites in your market. But what should you measure?

- Meta tags
- Alt tags
- Titles
- Names of the images on the page
- Heading tags: h1, h2, h3…
- Frequency and position of the keywords in the body text

Each one of these items should be measured independently. There are tools to run keyword density against your competitors. If you run them against the top 3 or 5 sites, you may start to understand the secrets of top rankings.

Again, your keyword density needs to look natural; otherwise you may fail in overall optimization. This is when you use keywords too often or too little. If you look unnatural, your rankings will suffer as a result.

So, what did we learn here? Basically that the key to ranking highly in the search engines is to understand what the top 5 websites in your niche are doing and to apply this to your own website optimization.

What do you do now? Get out there and start getting inbound links for your site. Add quality content to your site daily. And be sure that your on-site optimization, such as keyword density, is similar to that of your top competitors. Continue to do this every day and you will be ranking a the top of the search engines before you know it.

About the author:

Trent Brownrigg is a successful internet marketer and home business mentor. Learn more about all aspects of online business by reading his free home business tips, discovering online home business information and visiting his home based business opportunities website.

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I will be totally honest here and I’m not trying to be discouraging, but it can take a long time to find the ideal work at home job. It’s not unheard of to find a WAH job within days, weeks or even months. A year or two is a more realistic time frame. Those who find a job in a short period of time could simply have been at “the right place at the right time”.

The perfect job is the one that everyone wants and always ask for and I can’t blame them because if I’m not doing what I’m doing now, that would be my perfect WAH job too. Data entry jobs are rare. They are like a needle in a haystack. It’s so competitive and few that once one becomes available it is quickly filled. So, what to do? You can try freelancing sites where you bid for projects. It may not be steady work, but once you get a project and get your foot in the door it can lead to further projects and possibly a permanent position. General or legal transcription may be your other option if you can type quickly and accurately. Texting is another option if you’re comfortable dealing with the adult content involved in the job.

Customer service jobs are more abundant. You will find a lot more positions opened in this field if you don’t mind phone work. It would be a bit harder if you have little ones around, but it’s do-able as most companies are very flexible with telecommuters.

It make take not only one job, but several work at home jobs to make the desire income you’re looking for or to replace your corporate America job. It takes time, patience and perserverance; be consistent, persistent and apply widely.

To your success,

Sophia

http://www.workathomespace.com

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