Best Home Based Businesses

I am going to guess that if you are reading this article you have probably seen a few web pages telling you how you can simply follow this or that, simple 7 step plan, and be earning $5000.00 per month in no time. Oh I forgot you will be doing this by spending just 10-15 hours per week.

Now it is not my place to tell you that you will not or can not achieve those results. Certainly there are many testemonials to tell you that this is how it can be.

I am however going to suggest that these plug and play programs do not frequently achieve the sort of results that are highlighted.

It is also appropriate for me to mention that I am in no way recomending that you do not invest in this type of program. Many of them are backed by highly reputable companies that have been around for many years.

There are also as you have seen by the testimonials a number of people who are living very comfortable lives as a result of their involvement in this type of system.

I am more interested in helping you to decide if this is the right business for YOU.

Yes I have tried a number of them. Some of them I make money from, some of them have been scams, and others I believe to be good systems but just not right for me.

Now that I have all that negativity off my chest, lets look at what sort of business is available to you;

Firstly lets seperate them into two categories; Online and Offline.

OK so there are any number of opportunities for an online business and many of those are completely reliant upon being online.

Offline businesses however are more than likely also able to be conducted at least to some extent online. For that reason alone I am going to concentrate on businesses that can be established Online.

There are so many opportunities for you online that keeping focussed may well be the biggest problem you face. I can guarantee you that this is probably the biggest killer of aspiring internet marketers.

OK so here is what you need to be successful online, and while I am simplyfying it, these are the basic ingrediets.

1. A Good quality product and OR
2. Something you are knowledgable about (and even better if you are passionate about it).
3. A web site to feature your product(s) OR Knowledge
4. Visitors to your website
5. Facility to deliver your product(s) OR knowledge
6. A method of staying in touch with your customers

The first two points are hopfully something you already have in mind. They will be your work in progress for ever more. That is what business is all about. Producing new products that will add to, diversify from, or supercede your old products.

The third point should be a simple one. You really have two options. Build your own, or pay for someone to do it for you.

If you are going to build your own I would encourage you to make an early decision to set yourself a specific period of time out from everything else to do with your business and get it done asap. Make sure most of all that it is functional but do not strive for perfection. If you do you may never ever get to the next stage which is where you get to make money.

Regardless of which method you take, do take the time to research what your competitors are doing with their design. If you can give them a call to see how effective their site is.

You should get some good ideas of how to structure your site. This can be a part of the instructions you give to your web designer.

The general rule is that "pretty" sites do not perform well for sales. So keep your site focussed on relative stuff. Pictures, audio and video will enhance your site but let them be there to serve a purpose, not for decoration.

So now that you have your website up and running, here is where you win or loose in the game of internet marketing. You could have the best product in the world and the most fantastic web site, but if you have no visitors to your web site, how are you going to be able to offer your product.

Now don't get me wrong, I dso not want to place a higher value on traffic generation than product quality, for the flip side is if you have great volumes of traffic and poor quelity products, any successes you have will onlybe very short lived.

Most business comprise two distinct aspects:

1. Flair or creativity, and
2. Methodology

Getting people to visit your web site requires both. Marketers are often seen as very creative people, and this is probably a fair assesment.

However marketing on the internet can be a very fickle process. It is also a vastly different process than offline marketing.

There are a number of methods to get your web site seen, far too many to go into here. I will however split them into 2 categories, Free methods and Paid for methods.

The most common for of paid advertising is Pay Per Click, or PPC. You can use PPC advertising in many places, the best known one is with Google. When you do a google search you will be returned on the left hand side of the page a list of websites that relate to the topic you asked about.

Up to the first 3 of those items may be websites that are paying Google to appear there and will have a "sponsored links" notation. Down the left had side of your page will be a list of smaller "advertisments" and these will also be headed "sponsored Links.

These sponsored links are people useing PPC to advertise their businesses. It costs them nothing to be there, however if you click on one of their links, Google will charge them a fee. That is why it is called Pay Per Cleck.

If you are useing PPC to advertise your business, then you will want to be appearing at or near the top of that list of sponsored links. Google ranks those sponsors by a combination of how much they have bid per click as well as popularity. This is a comprehensive topic and one I suggest you leave alone until you have a greater understanding of how the internet works.

If you are keen to utilise PPC as soon as possible, it can certainly explode your business, if done effeciently. It can also very quickly explode your credit card. So do your research, and most importantly start small and be extremly particular in tracking your results.

The other alternative is free advertising and once again there are many options here. I am going to briefly cover the only one that I consider to be truely effective, Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO.

SEO is a pretty impressive title and can seem a bit intimidating. And the total topic of SEO is a somewhat technical area. But lets take a different look at it. There is a whole heap of technical stuff you can do to the unseen part of your website that will help you to get noticed by Google and the other search engines. That is the stuff that I recommend you pay someone else to do.

However you have control over the stuff that is seen on your web site. Every single article, blog post or any other written group of words on your web sites can and should be "optimised"

This is a relatively simple process and simply means that if you are writting about Dog Beds, then there is a simply statergy for useing the keyword "dog beds" in your article to give it the greatest chance of being noticed by the search engines.

So remember that earlier I mentioned that both your aritistic talents need to be used in writing your articles as well as useing a methodology that will get your stuff noticed.

Once you have put your article on your web site or blog, or perhaps with Hub pages or Squidoo, there are other sets of methodologies that you can use that will then maximise your chance of being noticed.

All of these steps are aimed at getting you listed on that front page when a consumer types in "dog beds" into that google search bar.

I did call this free advertising and in essence it is free, but you can quickly see that it will take quite a bit of your time and energy. Howver the results can be dramatic. There are about 1400 people per day typing in "dog beds" to a google search bar.

You could have 1400 people reading your article per day. And the great thing is that if you have a great article, you will stay in that position for a very long time. You see the more people that read your article, the more Google will see that it must be good stuff, and will keep showing it. You see that is really what google is trying to do, present the very best information to the person typing those all important keywords into their search bar.

So you need to make sure that you are writing great stuff about those keywords, and also letting google know that your article IS about those keywords.