Work at Home Based Business

Archive for the ‘Internet Marketing’ Category

Micro Planning In Action!

If you are trying to build an Internet business in your spare time while holding down a full time job, the only way to keep up momentum will be to adopt good time-management practices and develop a micro-planning strategy so that you know what you have to do at any given time of the day and can mentally prepare for it.

To make good use of any dead time in your day, look at how much time you’ll have available to work on your business and how energetic – or not – you are likely to be. Then allocate the most suitable task to that slot in your schedule.

With micro-planning, it is neither advisable nor feasible to plan more than 48 hours ahead. That is not to say that you should abandon making weekly and monthly macro-plans. Micro-planning is all about filling in the gaps in your day with appropriate tasks in order to keep your sideline Internet business (or whatever) moving forward in spite of your main commitments. To do that successfully you need to be able to predict with reasonable accuracy how you are likely to feel and how likely your
schedule is to change.

To squeeze full value out of micro-planning, draw up a set of lists of the various kinds of job that can be done in different time frames and on different energy levels. For example, tasks that use up a lot of creative energy should be reserved for those days when you have generous periods of free time and are likely to have sufficient energy to get them done. Personally, I recommend early mornings for those kinds of tasks – things like writing articles, creating sales letters, designing websites and so on. Jobs like that should be placed on the “high energy/plenty of time”  list.

On the other hand, low input jobs that don’t require much time or energy to complete should be placed on a second “low energy/quick and easy” list. Tasks such as social networking, posting comments on forums and blogs, responding to e-mail, surfing traffic exchanges for credits, posting classified ads and so forth are ideally suited for those short, low energy time slots.

The photo of a page from my schedule earlier this month illustrates my micro-planning technique in action. I am a freelance English language teacher and teach various types of classes in various locations around town. Between the gaps in my teaching day I added various tasks that I thought I could realistically get done, and have checked them off as I did them. Okay, I admit I photographed one of my more successful weeks when I was able to maintain high energy and motivation levels for several days in a row.

Things do not always go so well, but even so, micro-planning makes it much more likely that you will do more to maintain momentum for your side-business during a busy week at the office, in the classroom, shop, factory, or coalface.

David Hurley
Increasing Time Management Skills for Achieving Goals

How does a funded proposal system work?

…And why should it be of any interest to struggling Internet marketers?

The aim of a funded proposal system is to help Internet marketers to fund their main business through the sale of a low-cost high-perceived-value entry product on the “front end” and generate bigger sales for the marketer on the “back end”.

A funded proposal system takes into account the fact that the first sale is always the most difficult one to get, and that sales are more likely to flow from an established customer base through purchases on the “back end” after trust has been built up between the buyer and the seller.

A high quality funded proposal system is based on the premise that it makes sense for network marketers to work out a way to generate an initial sale before they introduce their primary business proposal to the prospect.

With a funded proposal system, a low-cost but highly useful product or service is promoted first and is designed to fulfill two objectives:

Objective 1. Sales of the low cost product “on the front end” will bring in cash to help keep the Internet marketer in business.

Objective 2. The “front end sale” builds trust between the prospect and marketer, and leads the warmed-up prospect down a “funnel” which will introduce the primary business “on the back end”.

A recent development has seen the emergence of highly professional funded proposal website systems being sold at deep discounts in the business to business field on the Internet. These professionally designed funded proposal systems are sold as “front end” products in their own right.

A recent example of this is the highly professional Prosperity Marketing System where you can plug your own affiliate links into the website and turn it into your own sales funnel.

The beauty of this kind of system is that you can promote all of your different affiliate links simply by marketing a single link to your funded proposal website. When someone signs up through your link you will earn a small commission from the system, and your new affiliate will see all your affiliate products and will be encouraged to sign up to them and turn them into products in his or her own affiliate funnel.

However, a professionally designed funded proposal system should also give new affiliates the choice of adding their own programs to the system.

For one thing, the system will sell much better if this benefit can be emphasized, as it gives every prospective member of the system the chance of plugging in his or her own affiliate programs as well as giving the funded proposal website seller an opportunity to present his or her affiliate programs to the prospect.

Professionally designed funded proposal systems offer Internet marketers a great way to generate some quick income and at the same time build their main business.

Find out more about how you can turn your Internet business into a “front-and-back-end money machine” with Prosperity Marketing System .

David Hurley
Best Internet Marketing Strategies

by David Godot

The past decade’s worldwide economic decline has forced many professionals to seriously reconsider their business models. Many businesses have gone under and many more employees have been forced to find new jobs or relocate altogether. Successful entrepreneurs must understand and utilize new technologies in order to expand their market.

For example, let’s say I am a psychotherapist in Chicago. If you’ve ever been to Chicago, you’ll know that you can hardly throw a rock on Michigan Avenue without hitting a psychotherapist. The market is flooded, and on top of that, insurance cutbacks and financial difficulties have discouraged people from seeking this type of treatment to begin with.

With a market this full, many who enter the field would become discouraged and give up their dream of operating a private practice. However, there are two things we can realize that will help us to see that this dream is still a possibility. The first is that more and more consumers are seeking all types of services on the internet. The second is that this actually expands the possibility for controlling your own destiny as a business owner.

Take my psychotherapy example. If I search on google for “psychotherapist in Chicago,” I will find a fair amount of competition. I might even have a difficult time marketing my expertise in the area of treatments for depression. But suppose one of my specialties is treatment resistant depression. How much competition do you suppose I’d find for that?

This ‘long tail effect’ is what allows entrepreneurs in any field to market the specific things that they are best at, which are usually the same things they enjoy doing most. Additionally, specialized services–especially those which require additional training and experience–often warrant a higher fee. Meaning that by focusing on the core of my offerings I have actually positioned myself to make more money than if I had attempted to be a generalist.

This niche marketing principle is counterintuitive to anyone who has not immersed themselves in the developing internet business culture. The more natural way of thinking in the real world has always been ‘the more services I offer the more money I can potentially make.’ As technology advances and we see a general specialization across fields, this is decreasingly the case. For the time being, this cultural and economic shift provides an incredible advantage to anyone who understands it and is willing to structure their business around it.

Everyone likes to think their home based business is solid as a rock, I know I do! Sit back and think about yours for a minute. Is it REALLY as solid as you think it is or could it be gone in an instant?

It’s very difficult for us to realistically look at our business model and determine if it’s solid or not. That’s why I am writing this post, I’m going to force you to take a good hard and long look at your home business model. Hopefully, after you do that, you’ll have a pretty good idea of whether or not your home based business is built on a solid foundation or if it’s on the verge of crumbling to the ground.

The best way to do this is with an example…

If you’ve been an internet marketer long enough then you surely remember the “Made for Adsense” sites of the early part of this decade. If you don’t remember then just imagine. Internet marketers were making a killing with them! Then, something tragic happened…

Google decided that all these sites were basically worthless and put an end to them. They got removed from the index and all of the income they were producing for marketers dried up overnight. And I won’t even mention how many people completely lost their Adsense accounts forever. A lot of online home business owners never recovered from that event.

Okay, let’s take a closer look at this business model to show why it wasn’t solid. What did it depend on? It was built on the Google Adsense program… A third party site. In this case, the internet marketer had no control over the program itself, in particular, the Terms of Service of that program. If Google changed the rules, which they did, it could have adversely affected the income of each online home business owner, and it did. In fact, these changes in policy may have been the biggest disaster in terms of adverse effects on home business owners in the history of making money online. Another similar home based business killer was when eBay banned the sale of digital products.

Do you see what the point is here? I know it’s impossible to predict the future, but you need to look at your home business model and see how much of it is within YOUR control and how much of it is being controlled by a 3rd party site like Google or eBay? If more of it is being controlled by other sites, then you have a business model that could fall down around you at any minute.

Once you recognize this, you can then take steps to correct the problem. That might mean you need to come up with a whole new home based business model to ensure you have an indestructible business.

If you don’t do this then all you can do is hope for the best. But in the ever-changing internet marketing world, I wouldn’t count on anything!