Work at Home Based Business

Archive for November, 2008

Black Friday…it’s every retailer’s favorite day of the year. This is the day when all the money is made. Well, guess what? It can be a great day for marketers and home business folks as well. All you need is a plan. I’ve got one for you. It involves your list. If you don’t have one, start building one. Let’s begin there.

Put together a free report related to the niche that you’re in. Let’s say you have a book on how to cure acne naturally. What you might want to do is put together a report that explains to people why they should go with an all natural cure instead of with drugs. Then, give the report away for free.

You’re going to have to sign up with an autoresponder service and have a squeeze page created to collect opt ins. You’re going to give the report away in exchange for people’s email addresses. This is how you build your list.

Okay, now that you have your list, the next step is to send them occasional emails with some additional tips on the subject. Mixed in with these tips you gently remind them of this great book you wrote on the subject of natural acne cures. If you provide these people with an informative news letter, you’ll be surprised at how many of your subscribers will actually purchase from you because you’ve earned their trust.

What you might want to do on a day like today is maybe offer them a special on the book. Let’s say it’s selling for $27. You might make a one day Black Friday special of 50% off, or even 60% off. The cost of creating the book is already done and figured in so you’re not really losing anything and you’re likely to get prospects buying who normally wouldn’t have bought from you at the regular price. People are always looking for sales.

Taking advantage of sale days is one of the best ways to make a few extra bucks on days like Black Friday or any other big day of the year. This tactic will work on Christmas, 4th of July, Memorial Day and many of the major holidays.

So get out there and make some money today!

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing…experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.

Affiliate marketing suits stay-at-home moms because it provides intellectual stimulation and the catalyst for building social networks online. At the same time affiliate marketing can be a lucrative source of income to offset the loss of income and additional expenses of child rearing.

Affiliate Marketing provides four key sources of intellectual stimulation that can contribute to the psychological, social and physical well-being of stay-at-home moms:

1. The challenge of mastering the affiliate marketing process

Affiliate marketing is a life-long learning pursuit. It takes of lot of skill and experimentation to find an appropriate niche and an effective marketing strategy. However, there are very few barriers to entry and there are many free sources available for creating and marketing an online affiliate business. One of the secrets is to focus to accelerate your learning and then utilise your affiliate income in the early stages to fund further learning and marketing.

2. The opportunity to share your expertise

The wisest course in affiliate marketing is to start with products and services related to your field of expertise and interest. Stay-at-home moms can gain a real sense of satisfaction and enjoyment from sharing their expertise and passions through affiliate marketing activities. Social marketing sites such as Squidoo are designed explicitly to enable anyone to share their knowledge and interest on any topic. These no-cost platforms provide a very wide range of tools for this purpose. By sharing your expertise you also attract people who have similar interests.

3. The connections and stimulation from online social networks

Affiliate marketing today thrives on Web 2.0 technology and related social networking activity. Stay-at-home moms can build their Internet profile and social networks through any of the many social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Squidoo. Blogging too can provide a means of building and connecting a personal following. The emergence of podcasting and video marketing adds further potential for personalizing your marketing. Again, focus is important in the first instance, but the opportunities to grow a social and business network are numerous.

4. The catalyst for creative activity

Affiliate marketing is a great catalyst for creative endeavor. One of the more satisfying activities is to create your own products (no matter how small). This develops a sense of achievement, a steady cash flow and the potential to fund further product development and marketing. Many of the social networking sites, such as Squidoo, facilitate creativity by enabling multi-media presentations with a point-and-click technology. It has never been easier to create something that is new, fascinating and attractive to others. You can now even turn your photos into animated musical videos with a simple web-based technology.

One of the best foils for the isolation and depression experienced by many stay-at-home mums is focused activity. Affiliate marketing provides a catalyst for undertaking such activity as it brings rewards in terms of intellectual stimulation, personal satisfaction, social connection and increased income. It’s important, at the outset, however, to choose a sound affiliate marketing plan to avoid frustration and unnecessary loss of income.

Discover a marketing plan that works for stay-at-home mums: Marketing Plan Example

Ron Passfield is a Top 100 Squidoo Lensmaster and Giant Squid: Squidoo marketing

This is a major rant that is as a result of something that happened on the Warrior Forum just this evening. I hope you will take this advice to heart because it is really for your own good. And yes, I know it’s ironic that in an article titled “Don’t Let People Tell You What To Do” I am now going to tell you what to do, but when you read it, you’ll understand. Okay, let’s first tell the story of what happened.

I was asked at the forum to tell what my day was like. People wanted to know what I did on a daily basis to become so successful. So, I told them. I went through my whole day from morning until evening, every step of the way. I left nothing out. Yes, it’s quite a full day for me. Heck, I’m writing this article at 10:11 PM so you can imagine how hard I work at my business.

Anyway, most people replied to the thread that they were inspired by my story but one person came to the thread and essentially said to me that I must be really miserable working as hard as I do. I couldn’t believe the nerve of this person, assuming that he knows anything about my life, what I like and what I don’t like. Because my lifestyle doesn’t suit him, he assumes that I must hate what I do.

Let me make this perfectly clear. I LOVE what I do. I wouldn’t do anything else in the world but Internet marketing. I love the long days. I get bored when I’m not working. I’m not the kind of person who can sit around all day watching TV. I’d go nuts. If I didn’t enjoy my life, I’d do something else…trust me on that.

Anyway, here is the point of this article. Don’t let anyone, and I mean ANYONE, make you feel like what you’re doing is wrong. It’s YOUR life and you have to live it the way you want. So please don’t let anybody tell you what to do with it. If somebody has a suggestion that might help you, listen. You can then accept it or reject it…YOUR choice.

I’ve been running MY business MY way for almost 6 years now and I am very proud of the business that I have built up. It didn’t happen overnight and yes, there have been long hours. But they have been more than worth it.

My mortgage will be paid up this December…11 years early.

Anyway, I hope this has been of some inspiration to you. And I promise…I will NEVER tell you what to do.

I’ll just make some friendly suggestions.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Want to make money TODAY without spending a DIME? Check out my site at http://www.hottrendsdaily.com/ and find out how.

Don’t look now, but Christmas is only a few weeks away once again. It’s a time for families to get together, kids to open their presents, office workers to do lots of embarassing things at the office party…

Ok, we all know Christmas is a time of festivities and fun!

But for those of us trying to make a buck (or several) online, what does it mean for your home business? Well, it’s a pretty good time to roll out the seasonal affiliate sites, dust them off and put them to work for you. Don’t have anything suitable? Well, believe it or not there is still time to make new ones if you’re quick. But you have to act fast.

First of all you have to be able to put up a half decent site quickly, get enough original content on there with a liberal sprinkling of your keyword to satisfy the search engines that its legit, then be able to link to it fast and furiously. Then rinse and repeat with more sites.

Why more than one site?

You need to build in some redundancy as well as create an interlinking system. By building in redundancy, I mean you’ll need a few sites that all target exactly the same keyword because you’re probably going to have a fight on your hands with a certain search engine that is currently indexing and de-indexing new sites seemingly at random. Some will feature in the SERPs and some won’t. And you need search engine traffic for this to work.

Here’s how.

Say you want to target a fairly competitive seasonal keyword, such as Christmas tree decorations, Christmas gifts, artificial Christmas trees or something similar. You’ll need three or four blogs with that exact keyword in the url, the site title and the page headers as far as on-site SEO goes. Don’t waste time looking for domains, you probably won’t find any .com’s suitable. Use some of the many free blogging hosts available, but just make sure they allow you to put up affiliate ads before you start building.

Build your blogs with a simple template and write an intro post, then social bookmark them to as many places as you can. Meanwhile, find a good affiliate company that has Christmas tree decorations (or whatever your keywords are) vendors that you can sign up with. ShareASale is one pretty good one, but there are others too like CJ etc and don’t forget eBay. There is a killing to be made so spread your net as wide as possible.

Now you’ll also need some supporting sites that you control that cover topics broadly similar to your keywords, such as special occasions, gifts, or anything similar.

What, you don’t have any?

Sheesh! You want an online business but haven’t been building backup sites? What about Squidoo, Hub Pages, Blinkweb, Blogger, Wordpress… the list is long and available so there is no excuse for not having the resources. They are there in abundance and if you’re not using them then don’t quit your day job just yet!

Ok, for those of you with plenty of sites, edit them all and add a link to each of your main Christmas keyword targeting sites with the keywords in your anchor text. I take it you know how to do that…

These links may or may not get counted in time, but do it anyway. The theory here is that if you throw enough mud, some of it will stick. Write some articles (also with your keyword anchored link) and submit them to a few top ezines (ezine articles etc). Get into some of the forums you are a member of and put a link in your sig to your sites and post something worthwhile. You are a member of some forums, aren’t you? Good!

The whole idea is to get your sites indexed fast and into the SERPs in the short term.

The next phase is to start writing as fast as you can. You want to hammer as many articles into your main blogs as you can. Don’t worry about them being perfect, just readable (the writer in me hates to say that, but needs must). Post as often as you can (daily or even twice a day) because the more you do it, the more often the Google bot will come visit your sites and give them the short term authority in the index that you need. Also, link the blogs to each other from within those posts. Normally this is not a good idea, but in this case in the short term you only care about creating authority fast.

In the meantime, you should have been accepted into some of the affiliate programs, so start creating pages in your blogs and fill them up with the products you want to sell.

Keep going like a mad person and some of the mud will stick. One or more of your blogs will appear in the SERPs for long enough to attract sufficient traffic to make some sales over the next few weeks. After that, Google will most likely sandbox your sites anyway, but who cares? You will have wrung out of them as much as you could while the going was good, which is all you wanted to do!

Of course, the sites will emerge from the sandbox in 6 months or so ready for an assault on next year’s festive season with the added bonus that they will have acquired more authority and will therefore do better next year!

That’s one way to make use of Christmas with your home business!

Terry Didcott
Internet Marketer, Writer and promulgator of how to make money online

I know the title may sound too good to be true, but there are work from home jobs out there that don’t require a set schedule. I’m not talking about affiliate marketing or home business opportunities. These are actual telecommute jobs you can work from home in your spare time or as a supplemental income to a full-time or part-time job.

Here are 7 work at home when you want jobs:

1. KeyForCash.com is a data entry job open to US residents only.

2. BabytoBee.com email: jessie [AT] babytobee [DOT] com for a customer service position.  You must be able to work a minimum of 10 hours per week.  These are warm leads where you will be asking people if they would like to try various free offers on the Babytobee.com website. A nice thing about this, if you’re logged into the system for just 20 minutes, you will still get paid for being online.  When you work for Public Opinion Research.net, you are conducting polls usually of a political nature.

3. Mechanical Turk or MTurk.com is Amazon’s marketplace for work that requires human intelligence.  You can pick and choose your HITs or Human Intelligence Tasks. The pay ranges from $0.01 to $10 or more. I have found simple data entry jobs and transcription work. If you’re quick and there are a lot of HITs to complete you can make a decent income. All US residents can be paid directly to their bank accounts and anyone outside the US is compensated with an Amazon gift card.  There is a forum where you can get tips and information on how to get the most out of MTurk. http://turkers.proboards80.com/index.cgi

4. Internet Search or Research Guides are simple human search engines.  It’s like searching on Google except you ask a question and a human can help you find what you’re looking for. Here are several sites you can check out: JustAnswer.com, Issuebits.com, and Kgb.com

5. Google Quality Raters – These are temporary part-time jobs to help with search quality evaluation. You must work a minimum of 10 hours/week and it’s available only to US and Canada residents.

6. TicketPuller.com – When you work for Ticket Puller you are helping clients buy or pull tickets for various events.

7. You transcribe short personal notes and voice messages at QuickTate.com/iDictate.com.

I hope you find this helpful.

To your success,
Sophia owner of WorkAtHomeSpace.com – a free resource of work at home companies including data entry, non-phone jobs, medical/general/legal transcription, virtual assisting, teaching/tutoring, and much more. Visit http://www.WorkAtHomeSpace.com/forum for daily posting of new job leads.