There are a lot of people out there who are considering starting a business – whether from home, or a conventional business – and trying to decide how to best market it. There are also many people who currently own a business – whether successful, or simply breaking even. Some of this business owners do mostly offline marketing (word of mouth, newspaper ads, flyers) and are considering adding online marketing to their campaign, and some have never considered online marketing, nor do they know much about it.

Which ever group you may fall into, it doesn’t really matter. At this point in time, I’m not going to say marketing online is a must, but if you’re not doing, it you’re giving up a lot of business – especially if you sell a product or service that can be used anywhere in the world.

If you’re selling vitamins, jewelry, health and nutrition products, online education, book, e-books, etc. – why would you not want people in Europe and elsewhere to buy from you? Why would you want to restrict yourself to your town or state? It doesn’t make much sense.

By putting your business online, the whole world becomes your market place. It’s quite a cool feeling to see money deposited into your account from a customer in Indonesia. Furthermore, if you’re marketing a product or service that you truly believe in, that you truly feel can improve people’s standard of living and society – then isn’t it your duty to get in front of as many people as possible?

Hopefully, you’re in business doing something you’re passionate about. If you’re just out to make a buck, well that won’t last long. There really does have to be a greater purpose behind what you’re doing. The internet allows us to connect with people anywhere in the world. Using Voice Over IP (Internet Based Phone Service) allows us to speak to anyone in the world for pennies on the dollar. We truly live in an historic period of time.

If you’re marketing communications services (VoIP, cell phones, internet service, etc.) you may not be able to market to the world, but at the least you can market to the entire nation if not also Canada. Either way, there is no reason to limit yourself to your immediate location.

At this point, I hope I’ve made you aware of the most obvious benefits of marketing online. There are many ways to do this – be it Pay Per Click, Ezines (online articles), backlinks, or solo ads – so educate yourself on the benefits, costs, and experience necessary to apply each of those successfully before you jump into it. If you do so, I promise you’ll be ecstatic with what it will do for your business to get online.

If you need more information or advice on any of the above, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’ll either help you out, or direct you to someone who can.

To Your Success

Despite all the abundance in the world today, there is one luxury that still eludes most of us and this is financial independence. It is not, however, a luxury impossible to achieve. When looking at what vehicle you will use to achieve your financial independence, stop for a moment to take a serious look at home based network marketing.

Working from home is a dream for thousands of people around the world and there are those ‘lucky’ few who have achieved it successfully. The key to their success is the understanding of what it takes to market a home based business. It requires persistence and an unwavering commitment.

There a literally thousands of home based business opportunities and they range from investments of under a hundred dollars to investments in the thousands. For the average person, the primary reason they are looking to start a home based business is to improve their financial situation and so a large upfront capital outlay is not possible.

A case for a Home Based Network Marketing Business

Many people invest in home based network marketing as it requires little capital and usually promises great returns. This is the attraction for most people because the product or service on offer has a global market appeal and is within reach financially for the average person. Generally, because it is fairly easy to join a network marketing opportunity it means you can invest your time and money in marketing your business.

The biggest draw card for starting a network marketing business from home is the leverage you can create. As a simple explanation, this means you benefit from the marketing efforts of people in your organization. You will hear network marketers say very often ‘the more people you help get what they want, the more you get what you want’ or variations of that statement.

The other draw card is the home based network marketing company you join, in almost all cases, will have training and support to assist you in growing your own business. The people who introduced you into the business will also be available to assist as they have an invested interest in your success.

3 Strategies to Make Your Home Based Network Marketing Work

Once you have decided network marketing is for you, there are some important considerations you will need to take into account:

Firstly, you must treat this like a business. You will do yourself a tremendous favor by finding out from people who have started their own business, what is required each and everyday to make it a success.

Secondly, you must teach yourself to be motivated. Anyone can be motivated when they are excited about something new. There are many distractions at home and after a tough day at your job, it will take a personal commitment to work on your business.

And finally, you must have staying power. Your decision to start a home based network marketing business must be a long term one. You should not have an expectation of getting rich quick, although making some money almost immediately is certainly possible. Make the decision to build your business no matter what the stakes are and you will be successful. Above all have fun and enjoy building your home based network marketing business.

The theory of a traffic exchange is great- you need traffic, they provide traffic. Signing up for a traffic exchange means you will be getting more traffic all right, but there is no guarantee that any of it will translate into sales. Traffic exchanges make no sales guarantees, and they don’t much mention your actually making money after getting this new traffic. So why do people join them?

When signing up with a traffic exchange, you are agreeing to visit other sites in that exchange network. For doing this, you will then get traffic from other members directed to your own site. So, site owners are looking at your site, browsing around, they may see something they like and buy it. Or, they may think your site is a great idea and mention it on their own site. Of course, in reality, it never seems to quite work that way.

Large sites don’t have much reason to join traffic exchanges and look at other people’s sites like this. Small businesses with fairly new sites do. So guess who joins traffic exchanges? Any advertising you might get on a site from being seen on a traffic exchange is going to be on a small, low budget site, which likely won’t bring much traffic your way even if it does happen.

In addition, many traffic exchange systems are set up on a cheesy automatic timer so that you don’t have to spend too long looking at any one site in order to get in your quota. The time each site is given is usually less than a minute, giving you such in-depth exposure to those small, beginning websites. Just imagine the business that will come your way from all of that.

Think about your own reasons for wanting to join up with a traffic exchange. Is it to seek out new life and new civilizations? To boldly find new websites and buy lots of stuff from them? Heck no. People want to join because it is cheap, or free, and you don’t have to spend much time looking at those other sites in order to bring traffic to your own. So how many of the other guys do you suppose join the exchange to buy things from other people?

Most traffic exchanges work on a credit system- you have to earn credits to get viewers to your site. You earn credits by looking at sites, then those credits are used to send viewers to yours. And the quota is usually not one to one. Sometimes you have to look at two or three sites in order to get one person directed to your site. So, members are going to try to look at as many sites as possible to get their own traffic numbers up. Seeing as many sites as possible, combined with the short times they have to view each site, it is pretty unlikely that any one site will stand out enough to ever return to. So, if you want untargeted traffic for no real reasons, traffic exchanges are terrific. Otherwise, traffic exchanges suck.

While the title may have captured your attention, understand that I am male, so I write like a man. Besides that, it’s my story. My political correctives ends with the title so consider yourself warned.

I was so excited I could hardly stand it. After spending the last eight years on the road selling food door to door, I could finally see a way out. This was the answer, the ticket to our freedom and the key to our dreams. I went to the free seminar, met some good people, signed up and couldn’t wait to get started. my biggest fear, however, was telling my wife just how much I had invested in our future. See, we had just refinanced our house to pay off other bills.

Needless to say, it was pretty ugly – she broke down in tears. They were not tears of joy. I knew she would understand eventually. “Hear, just listen to this CD, it explains everything.” Listening to the CD’s wasn’t on her mind for the first few weeks. I knew that I had my work cut out for me so I got busy. By the end of the first three months I had recouped all our initial investment. She had seen the wheels in motion but still wasn’t convinced.

I had quit my job and was doing the business full time. I had repeatedly and relentlessly explained to her that if she would quit her fob and work with me full time, that we could easily triple our profits. That dog didn’t hunt. She saw the income potential but still needed convincing that this was a real business.

It was time to move on to plan “B”. I started rigging booby traps. I would strategically replace her reading materials with my positive information. My CD’s would be in her car with no others available. After a few months my persistence had paid off. She had agreed to go with me to one of my meetings. That was the ticket, finally, she saw the light. All my words and schemes could only go so far, but when I placed her around others that were successful in the business, it all started to take a hold.

If my story is all too familiar to you, just remember to let your decisive actions speak louder than your words. By watching you grow, they will also. The checks don’t lie so let them do your talking. Get them involved at their own pace and around others in the business that are more successful than you.

Today, we are working together, a little to close sometimes. She still tells me that I have an annoying habit of “hovering” over her. I prefer to call it “positive instruction”. Our experiences in entrepreneurship are new to both of us – sometimes unexpected, sometimes exciting, but never boring.

So all of you disgruntled spouses out there take heart. Your loved ones will come around eventually when they understand that your commitment to grow is for their benefit as well. Above all, it will be you’re actions, not your lip service, that draws them in. just remember, when you change your world, it may take a little convincing to make your loved ones a part of it.

You need a membership site of your own. You may never have thought of having your own membership site, but it is a strong customer attractant and is in some ways easier than the typical affiliate sites.

Building the customer list is a goal of affiliate marketers. Having a membership site is a great way to get that list built up fast. A list is basically what a membership site is made up of- people who are interested and want to come back again to see what is offered. People can join the site for several different reasons. They may want a newsletter you are offering, they may be happy to get several things they want all in one convenient place, or they may just love the font you use. Whatever the reason they join, the members can be charged a small monthly fee to keep getting access to what you have to offer. This will generally include articles, services available to them, some type of customer service for questions ad problems, and a forum to tie it all together.

Meeting you monthly income goals becomes much easier when there is a steady stream of paying members each month. That can be in addition to your affiliate sales, or it can be used in place of them. Some affiliate marketers find that they enjoy building their membership site more than trying to keep several different affiliate sales sites going. A membership site is a brand, and can be marketed more easily than several smaller sites.

Some membership sites also use their own affiliate marketing programs to attract new members. A commission or a flat fee is given to members who bring in new paying members. That can also be accomplished by simply waiving part of the membership fee for members that recruit. This costs the site owner nothing and brings in new members at a exponential rate. Using a system such as this, getting large membership numbers can be done more quickly and with less expense.

Membership sites are also a safe way to protect against sales slumps. A month with low sales will be cushioned by a steady income of monthly membership fees. And if there is a problem with your smaller sites, such as a loss of search engine rankings or a product that bites the dust, the larger site is there to step in and make up for that loss in income.

There are also free membership sites that set up the same basic format, but try to attract more members by not charging fees. The income with those sites is in getting the largest list possible to market to in the hopes of sales. A free membership site may not bring in the membership fees, but it will likely attract more members. Whether you want to charge to enter your own web kingdom or not, having a membership site is a strong marketing technique that can help brand your information and your products.

If you know how to create a bog then you have a fabulous promotional technique at your fingertips. A blog provides the ever-changing type of web content that search engine spiders die for, and if your website is new, then you will have no need to submit to any search engine for inclusion in its indices.

Spiders seek out blogs like they hunt flies, and when they find yours it will be reported back to headquarters immediately and your website will be scanned and immediately listed.  Assuming, that is, that the content warrants it and that your blog is considered good enough for the website link on it to be given a visit.

If you don’t continually change the content on your website, then it will quickly drop down the Google listings, and also those on the other search engines. However, it’s not just the website: it’s every individual webpage on your site that has to continually change, because the search engines list each page individually, not whole domains. Search engines just love change, because they exist to provide a good continuous information service to their users, and if the content of the web pages in their indices remained the same all the time, they would fail in that objective.

Therefore, they insist on change, and if you don’t provide it, your page will slip off the listings. A blog lets you change the content of your website with ease.  Not just the home page but every page. So, if you want your website to remain in the top listings then you will need to have a blog, the contents of which you can keep refreshing manually whenever you have a few minutes.

You can use a blog to interact with visitors to your site, and I fact you can use it virtually as a forum.  You can use it to advertise your new products, disseminate information and gain information.  A blog is a means of communication, and if you can create a blog then you have the ability to cerate traffic right there at your fingertips. You can update information and pass it your customers and friends faster than with an email.

In fact many people use blogs instead of websites.  They don’t have websites and just park their blog right there on the blog provider. There are several blog providers, but it is important to choose the right one if you are to create a blog that does exactly what you want it to do. You also have to learn how to use your blog to you best advantage.  Once you learn how, it is not difficult to create a blog just for providing information, but how do you make it pay?  And make it big time?

The best way is to have it on your website, rather than on the provider’s site, because then you can use a lot more customized plug-ins. Most cPanel websites can easily interface with Wordpress without much trouble.

That’s the secret of blogging, and that’s what makes the difference between a Blogger and somebody that just operates a blog. It’s a big difference in both ability and cash! Don’t just learn how to create a blog, but learn how to make your blog earn the kind of money for you that your website probably can’t even approach.

We have all heard of pay-per-click (PPC) and have seen it rise to become the primary form of online advertising in the space of only a few years. Most webmasters carry PPC ads on their sites these days, be it Google or any of the other PPC providers such as Yahoo or Miva. But how many people have heard of pay-per-play (PPP) and will it work?

As the name suggests, rather than getting paid for each ad-click, webmasters will get paid for each ad-play. A play consists of a five second ad each time a page is loaded that has the PPP code installed. It is a sound based ad that will be based around brand advertising rather than trying to sell a particular product. If the user stays on the page they will not continue to get ads, it is the just the single five second ad, unless they refresh the page.

The million dollar question though is, will PPP work? Sound can be really irritating for website visitors, especially when they are not expecting it. This in itself might deter some webmasters as it might scare their visitors away. On the other hand, it is only a five second ad and if enough websites adopt it, maybe it will become the norm and people will just get used to it.

As a webmaster myself I can see an immediate opportunity to make some quick cash from PPP via traffic exchanges and in particular, auto traffic exchanges. Most traffic exchanges require a page view for between twenty and thirty seconds and we all know most surfers are simply trying to build up their surfing credits. If I put the code on a page explaining what PPP is, surfers will get an ad alongside an explanation and on an auto traffic exchange that page could easily get hundreds of views per day. Each time an ad plays, I am earning a commission. And there are plenty of traffic exchanges that allow sound, so I can’t imagine this will do anything but earn me some bucks.

However, I will still need to be convinced of the risk/reward of putting the PPP code on all my website pages. I’d be really interested to see what other webmasters think about the risk/reward of PPP ads. The risk as I see it is that my visitors will be scared off. The reward is a commission for each ad played. While I intend to take the opportunity of earning some money from the traffic exchange concept, I am not yet ready to dive on in and put the code all over my site.

And what about the advertisers?

Most advertisers looking to promote a brand will be fairly large corporate type advertisers. They will only be attracted by PPP if it is widely adopted by webmasters. They are unlikely to experience the benefit if their ads are primarily being played in traffic exchange type environments. Corporate advertisers will want mainstream coverage. But they will only get mainstream coverage if webmasters are prepared to adopt the concept for the majority of their sites.

We seem to have reached a classic catch 22 scenario.

So are there any other considerations? The website that is currently signing up webmasters for the PPP launch on 1st February 2008 has an Alexa rating of 25000 but a Google page rank of 0. That means some serious marketing is going on behind this program. The website hasn’t been around for very long as borne out by their page rank but already they have enough traffic to put them in the top 25000 websites on the internet. Sure, a three tier affiliate program will help but nonetheless, there must be some serious money behind them. Further, they claim to be backed by a major search engine, as yet unnamed.

In short, I am yet to be convinced by PPP and whether it will work over the longer term. However, on the basis that it might work, I’d like to be a part of it. I’d also love to hear the views of other webmasters.

Instead of looking at web analytics as a tool to make improvements to your web presence, you must look at web analytics as what it would cost your company if you ignored its significance. Would I have your attention, if with the use of web analytics it is possible that your next e-mail campaign would result in 50 percent more revenue than your last e-mail. Think of how much revenue your business is losing because you don’t take advantage of web analytics.

Many companies don’t realize the potential for positive impact that web analytics can have on their business. Often, our ignorance prevents us from acknowledging the potential of web analytics. Companies with defined analytics programs are realizing double-digit growth in new Web site visitors, returning visitor traffic and conversion rates.

With growing pressure to make your marketing efforts, more profitable web analytics is becoming more-and-more critical. Let’s say you suspect that your website has to improve its usability. With web analytics, you can measure the effectiveness of your site usability. Then, based on the intelligence you gather, you can make the necessary changes. Due to the improvements you have made you may be able to improve your conversion substantially. As a result, you can measure the value of web analytics in terms of revenue.

The barriers to entry for adopting analytics technologies that can dramatically improve online businesses have never been lower. There are many inexpensive and even free options to start web analytics integrating into your business processes. Web analytics is not about technology. It is much more about people. Before you invest money in web analytics, you must invest in people. People within your organization must realize the importance of measuring your web presence.

Every business with a web presence must build a strategy around web analytics. Our goal is to get the highest possible value from KPIs. According to Forrester B2B, tech companies have realized 500-800% return on a 100K/yr in house analyst. Retail businesses realized 1000-3000% return on the same 100K/yr web analyst.

In the early days of online business, websites were built with ill-defined goals and very little consideration for ROI. If you want to succeed online today, you should not spend a dime without commercial benefit. Unless your decisions are based KPIs measure through your web analytics efforts, you are most likely to fail. You cannot compete without knowing exactly how effective your initiatives are. In every business, the focus is on the bottom line, and the same is true for web analytics.

Imagine how much more revenue you could be generating by analyzing the proper KPIs. Even better, imagine how much money your business is losing by not taking advantage of web analytics. Today, we have to necessary tools to make decisions based on data instead of intuition. We have to have a strategy to measure success and failure to maximize ROI. Always look at how much something costs. A bad business decision may cost loss of revenue. A business without web analytics will result in continuous bad decisions that is very likely will result in a failing business.

You do not have to wander around town looking for real estate to get into business for yourself. You can always start an internet business, provided you can offer a viable product or service, or take advantage of opening one of many available franchises. Your abilities, desire and financial resources can help determine the type of business and how long it may take to get it started.

When considering starting an internet business you need to determine the type of business you want to be involved with. You have the choice of selling products or services as well as whether you want to sell your own product line or someone else’s. The same can be true for service-related businesses. There are several companies offering services that you can resell and make a profit and if you find any of them useful, you may want to be involved.

You can also choose to sell a combination or products and services to take advantage of different aspects of the online shopping venture. While niche marketing and focusing on one product line has proven successful, so has being able to take advantage of different needs for different customer bases. Niche markets are more focused while a product mix reaches more of your targeted audience. You can also offer backend products, such as printer paper and ink to go with printers.

Working capital is a serious consideration in starting any internet business and probably the biggest expense will involve marketing your business. A good business plan can help you determine your target audience, which in turn will help determine where you will focus your marketing. This plan should be part of the overall business plan as without a specific market to target, you could end up simply throwing money into the wind and hoping it falls where it will do the most good.

Sustaining growth is another planning process and depending on your product line can be a viable exercise. Every business that sells merchandise should plan to offer products that are considered disposable. Items that customers will need to replenish or replace when used to gain the possibility of repeat business. Some businesses, such as home mortgages, are only able to sell to the same customer once, or maybe twice so they are constantly on the lookout for ways of generating more customers.

A business offering disposable items do not have to continually focus on new customers, rather good customer service and quality products can provide continued growth based on repeat shopping by the same customers. For example, if you sell digital cameras, it may be years between sales to the same customer. However, you can bolster your sales by also offering memory cards and printing services or supplies to bring in additional sales to existing customers.

Words are the keys to making your website rank well within search engines. The words on your pages; the words used in your Meta elements are vital in telling the search engines about your website or webpage. Words are the criteria used to categorize your webpages and deliver search results to search queries. Given the importance of words, careful thought should be given to the selection and combination of words chosen. From the very beginning of the web planning process, one should consider the impact and flow of words and phases that people would type in a search bar to find their website over the Internet.

Experts know that content is king in causing a site to be found in search results. Your content is built with the use of words. Consequently, this is as high-tech as it gets to optimize your site for favorable search results. Search engines need to read your page quickly and determine what it is all about. They read your source code, which consists of your page content and tags. The words and tags are the clues the search engines use to guide them on how to rank your webpage. Each page on a site is indexed separately. All pages of a site should not be indexed using the same set of terms, as each page serves a unique function.

A site with well designed content that include key buzz-words are likely to rank better than a site that is shallow on relevance content and just splatters a repletion of high-ranking keywords to trick the search engine robots. In order to identify the words appropriate for your site, a significant amount of research is required to identify your targeted keywords and a natural way to deliver them to make them sound interesting to your visitors.

When you develop a well thought-out page that speaks to your readers in a sensible way with keywords and metatags, you are doing yourself and the search engine a favor. It becomes a win-win situation for all, you, the search engine and your visitors. Search engine optimization is not to be viewed as trickery to manipulate your website to the top position in their search results. People who surf the web demand relevant and informative content to satisfy their search requests.

If your site was to display at the top of the search result and only provided marginal or worthless information, a visitor would simply click away. There is no love for irrelevant information. You only get about 8-seconds to state your case. It would equally be a shame if your site had the relevant information that a visitor wanted and your site was not indexed properly because of a lousy choice of keyword. Keyword research can be meticulous, time consuming, along with being a continuous ongoing process.

Keywords tend to change day by day and do not remain the same. The words used in a query today may appear obsolete a month from today. Your job is to continually identify the most up-to-date keywords to produce rich content for your site. This starts with reviewing your web metrics if you already own a website, or targeting the keywords and phases that are easy to market, if this is a new web project. The content on high-ranking sites are loaded with keywords relevant to the search query and keywords that the search engines have indexed the site on. Without these keyword and keyphases these top-ranked site would not be major contenders.

If your goal is to bring more natural and organic traffic to your website, you must learn to write intelligent content that has the power to capture the reader’s attention and friendly enough so that search engines index your site to rank well for the words used to covey your message. Your site should be built such that the content via words tell the search engines all they need to know about your pages. Your keywords, key phrases and Meta elements give the spiders something to chew on and get your site indexed for your targeted words.