Work at Home Based Business

Archive for the ‘Guest Authors’ Category

Darren Rowse and Brian Clark’s Third Tribe Marketing has just hit the airwaves of the Internet. The question in this post – is – is it any good?  This is my short review of Third Tribe Marketing – its waste of money even at the “special” low price of $27/month – soon to go to $47/month. One thing Brian Clark particularly, inventor of Teaching Sells, is not afraid of is charging a lot of his expertise.

So if you sign up for Third Tribe Marketing what do you get – well the promise is – unclear at best. You will get lots of great information from people who have made quite a lot of money mainly by selling stuff to naive beginners in the work at home business. In some ways its like a paid online networking forum with little defined purpose except to make you feel like one of the cool kids. Most of us were never cool kids at school – and I really dislike the assumption that if you hang around the rich and successful blogging founders of Third Tribe Marketing you will somehow become successful too. Its hardly going to happen when you look at the facts. Darren Rowse started Problogger long before there was any competition, Brian Clark was a successful off-line sales guy before he went online – do you see the pattern? If you currently don’t have a commercial skill and the selling skills of a successful consultant – this model won’t work for you.

Membership sites can be useful – but I pay for just one with an ongoing subscription – I talk about it my follow up Third Tribe Review which compares the site to the Keyword Academy. The keyword academy has no fluff at all – and very little networking. This is not he place to hang out and compare blogs – instead its a step by step guide to how to make money online using basic keyword selection and SEO.

The beauty of niche marketing is that it really doesn’t matter who you are – whether you are a great writer or a all around personable guy. What colour your skin is or where you live never comes into it. Whether you are on an invalid’s pension in a council flat – or a backpacker at an Internet cafe in Thailand – it doesn’t matter – if you have the skills to pick the right keywords and develop sites and backlinks you can make money. Hell you can even outsource the whole operation if that’s what you want to do.

Guest post by passive income expert, Lis Sowerbutts.

If you’re not already an expert, you probably have no concept where to start when considering setting up an email newsletter. And even though there are actually a number of mad geniuses out there, any person prepared to be thoughtful and strategic when it comes to their target market can easily be successful. In your industry, there must be no one better qualified than you. This article is intended to help increase your self-confidence as an email marketer by offering you each of the essential resources you need to master email marketing.

Newcomers to email marketing frequently will say how the process seems impenetrable or maybe magical to them. People get the impression that email marketing is something that only hired gun copywriters with four-figure hourly fees can comprehend. It may be that there is just a little bit of magic involved, but no more so than in any other form of marketing. If you take the time to analyze your market thoroughly, you find yourself making smart decisions, planning your email marketing campaign intelligently, and reaching success faster than you would have guessed.

A good starting point is to look at your campaign’s overarching purpose. What is it for? When people receive your messages, what do you hope will happen as a result? This part is easy if you’re building a list in order to promote a single product. But in other case you may want to consider the long term. Sending out regular messages over a long period of time can be a lot of work. In order to do that, you’d better make sure you know who your audience is.

No matter what you do, the first step is always going to be researching your market. You need to develop a clear assessment of what your market is, what demographics you’re a good fit for, and what specific needs you’re able to meet. But of course no matter how much research you do, you’ll find that things are different in practice than they are in theory. Even within specific geographic areas, populations are increasingly diverse. Over time, you’ll see different segments of readers emerge on the same mailing list. All you have to do is use software such as Active Campaign Email Marketing software to send unique, targeted content to each one of these segments.

Another important factor is the way your message looks. The design elements that you use in your messages should be consistent with the ways that you want your readers to interact with it. For example, in many cases you will want your readers to click through the links in your message and arrive at your web site. In this case, you’ll generally want your email template to be a pretty good match for the design of the actual web site. If they look the same, the reader will automatically know they’ve found the right place.

Next, you’ll want to consider what type of content will be appropriate for your email campaign. For example, let’s say you want to send out an informative newsletter every week. After you’ve done that for a while, you don’t want to just toss out an advertisement to a list like that. It won’t convert. By working your sales pitch into the existing informational format, you make it more familiar and more believable to your long-time subscribers.

Finally, you need to think about how you can get most of your recipients to open up and read the messages you send to them. There’s a little bit of a “secret sauce” factor that goes into this. A lot of things come into play. Any copywriter will tell you that the headline is one of the most important elements of marketing, no matter which medium you choose. The headline sells the message, while the message sells whatever you are selling.

But many people don’t realize that the first line of your message can be equally important. If you go into your email reader and look at the list of new incoming messages, you’ll probably notice that you can see a little snippet from the top of each message. If the teaser snippet is not compelling, many readers will assume the message is not worth their time, no matter what the headline may have promised. Another thing you may want to take into account is the hours that your particular subscribers will be most open to receiving your messages.

One thing you should never hesitate to do with your email campaign is to try new things. The more you do, the more you’ll develop an understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Once you’ve been doing this for a while, you’ll be amazed by the way you become so in tune with your market that you naturally understand what will or won’t work. It’s like magic.

Guest post by email marketing expert, David Godot.

We have our house for sale – its actually perfectly setup for someone who works at home as I do – but we are selling because we want to downsize our mortgage and spend less time fighting the garden.

But it got me thinking – what makes for the perfect home if you are looking for the houses for sale in Khandallah – or anywhere else? What does the work from home professional need in their home? Well, I have quite a long list having been renting for a few years – here’s some of them.

Requirements for a “Work At Home” House

• Must have a good sized separate room which I can call an office. Having separate office which you can close the door on is not only helpful psychologically – it also means that you will probably get a better tax deduction (check with an accountant or tax professional for the details on this).
• I need a view and natural light, and I need warmth because I live in a cold climate. You may need cooling if you live somewhere warmer.
• Must have sufficient power points and phone line connections – a quality and fast internet connection goes without saying. Improved wireless networking means that its no longer necessary to physically attach printers and modems to your computer – but they all still need power – so if you have the choice – you can never have enough power points!
• If you employ staff or have clients visit you at home its probably important to have a separate entrance to your work at home office. You don’t need the kids answering the door to the client! Equally you probably don’t want employees encroaching on your family space – so therefore you will probably need an office with a kitchenette and separate toilet too.

As my work at home business is entirely online based I don’t need to deal with clients or employees in my home – so rather than looking for a self-contained home office I want a room with a view, and good insulation.  What I might do is take the largest bedroom and use it for an office. In Wellington anything that is advertised as an “office” by a real estate agent really means “tiny cupboard” or large landing!  The key thing for me is to get a property that has an excellent broadband connection -this is not as simple as you may think – in new suburbs there are often not enough broadband connections to go around!

So whether you are looking for your next home or your first, whether you work at home or in a more traditional job, take a moment to sit down and really think about what you want from your next home, before you hit the streets checking out houses for sale!

Written by our guest author and work at home expert, Lis Sowerbutts.

Direct email marketing is one of the most effective and widely used marketing techniques in nearly every industry. The barriers to entry are very low, and the return on investment tends to be quite high. Some recent research has suggested that the effectiveness of email marketing may even be improving as attitudes change and young people gain influence in the business world.

Here is your quick, seven minute guide to getting starting with email marketing.

Do you market research. Email marketing is still marketing, so do your due diligence in finding out who it is you’re trying to sell to and what types of things motivate them.

Develop an email marketing strategy. Don’t just start hammering your list with ezine articles or special offers. Take the time to develop a plan: how do you get a subscriber from the point of signing up to the point of buying? Build trust, and then capitalize on that trust.

Don’t spam. Don’t buy mailing lists, build mailing lists. Any mailing list you buy is going to be a waste of money anyway, as it won’t convert and most of the messages will end up in peoples’ spam boxes.

Build your opt-in email list. Put together a nice prominent signup form, and display it above the fold on every page of your site. You can even use a slider to overlay the signup form over the rest of your content. Another option is to build a separate signup page or a squeeze page that exists only to sell free subscriptions your mailing list.

• Be sure to describe the benefits of joining the list.
• If you can, collect a little bit of demographic information that you can use to segment your list.
• Remember that if you do business offline, you can get people to subscribe face-to-face. Speaking engagements are a great place to pimp your mailing list.

Invest in an email marketing solution. I know it seems cheaper to pay $15 a month for AWeber or ConstantContact, but those services become pricier as your business grows. Plunk down the money for a software solution that you can keep using forever. I recommend ActiveCampaign’s Email Marketing software, because I work for that company and can personally vouch for the software and the support you’ll receive. It’s far and away the most mature email marketing app you’ll find.

Split-test different versions of your message. Write a few different headlines and see which one converts the best. Play around with different layouts and different calls to action. If you take my advice and use the ActiveCampaign software, you can set it up to test multiple versions at the beginning of a mailing and then automatically pick a winner to send to the rest of your list.

What is the Secret to Make Money Online?

So… what is that make money online secret? By now, you probably already know it. While knowing how to make money at home is no longer a “secret”, it is the implementation of the “secret” that tends to slow people down. It’s all in your implementation. If you already know how making money online works and yet you’re still not making any money, the problem lies somewhere in your implementation (or lack of perhaps).

For those of you who aren’t up on what this make money online secret is, I’ll say it one more time: Find profitable/obtainable niches, center your blogs around those niches’ keywords, get backlinks with the keywords as anchor text, and monetize the blogs with Adsense or affiliate links. It’s so boring and repetitive, but it works.

The problem most people face with following those guidelines is that they keep trying to get fancy and go way off track from the original make money online plan, which is…. If you don’t know, read the previous paragraph again.

Sticking with that same boring agenda day in, day out is the only sure way to making a living online. It couldn’t possibly get any simpler, and yet many people are making it complicated. Stay with your plan and it won’t fail you. It may not be as fast as you would like, but that’s life. There is no such thing as “easy money” or “fast money” in the world of  legitimate internet marketing.

Another problem a lot of people have is that they get discouraged too easily. You are not going to rank for the term “make money online” in 1 week – or in 1 month, and probably not even in 1 year (unless you have a lot of friends in the MMO niche who can help you out with backlinks), so stop getting all disappointed when you don’t! Give it time and go for easier niches first. Go for keywords that are in your league and work your way up. Once you have small successes with easy keywords, you will have the confidence and backlink support network available to give you a chance to rank on page 1 of Google for more competitive terms.

The most common question I get when people email me from my make money online ebook website is “How long did it take you to start making a living online?” It took me 2 years. It could take you longer or it could take you less time. It really depends on your level of resourcefulness, your ability to follow a plan, the amount of time you have available to work online, and your persistence. You will be able to make money online, but you have to be willing to do the work and tolerate the waiting period required in order to rank for keywords.

To Your Success,

Janet Smith