Home Based Business

I was reading the morning news and noticed one article from the news paper complaining about the national unemployment rate hitting 10.2 percent in the US. Most economists have predicted that despite the stimulus spending, job growth will always lag behind economic growth. Makes sense – right?

The systemic problem that I continue to see as a major hurdle is a reliance on people looking for a job instead of investing in their own future. Part of that problem seems to be apathy. People are fed up and upset because the government didn’t give them a job. News flash, nobody owes you a job or a living. You are responsible for your life, not someone else. Governments can create incentives for companies to want to do business in a particular country, state or local city. The idea that somehow my government is responsible is ridiculous.

The good news is that as the economy tanked in the past year, home based business ideas are flourishing. Would you like to know why? It’s because you get to control your future and not some be left to stress about having a job next week. Oh sure, starting a home based business is not for most people, but why not? It certainly could be if you took the necessary time to educate yourself about the basics in having a home based business.

Being involved in home businesses for the last 15 years, I certainly have learned my fair share of hard valuable lessons along the way. I had made plenty of mistakes as well.

Here’s a few things that I have learned to assist you in making an informed decision when looking for the right home based business opportunity.

The Company – how stable is the particular company that you are thinking about getting involved in? In other words, has the company just started up operations or have then been around for a few years. Most start-ups by the way won’t last in this industry due to competition.

Products or services – are they unique or in high demand? Most people checking out a company’s products or services don’t spend enough time really thinking about the market potential in my opinion. They sometimes get pressured to make a decision. I agree if you are thinking about getting involved in a business that costs less than $100, it’s not a big deal in my mind to go for it, if you have done some preliminary homework on the business model etc. If the price is significantly higher, then certainly you need to invest more time in getting your questions answered.

Management – how seasoned is the management team? I have seen many instances in which a company gets started only to fail in the first couple of years due to a lack of experience in the corporate office. To have stability and long term viability in any business, requires experience management period. Don’t short cut this process if you are starting a business. Make sure you base your decision to hire someone based on their experience. After all, if you are investing any significant money, you need to be prudent.

Training and Support – this is a huge and critically important area to make everything work. Without front office support and proper training, individuals trying to start a home based business opportunity will find it next to impossible to succeed. I have seen way too many companies fail in this one area and only to see thousands of individuals dreams and aspirations destroyed because of greedy owners. We are talking about people’s lives here, so pay attention owners. Give the proper training and support. In return, you will have a long term viable business.

With the internet becoming such a prominent role in most home businesses to make money, it’s absolutely important to have the proper IT structure in place. I remember one company that has been around for over 20 years utilizing out of date technology for many years. In the past few years, this company, which I won’t mention has turned around the IT foundation to become one of the leading companies in state of the art technology. They are constantly updating and investing in new equipment. In fact, this company has probably invested over 40 million dollars in just the past 3 years. This is an example of what to look out for when checking out companies.

I only go with companies that have the necessary equipment and technology in place, because I like utilizing the internet as the main way to promote any home based business.

Upline Support – Leadership – who is going to be your coach? We all need coaches or mentors in life. Part of the building process that I learned many years ago is to ensure one has a coach or mentor to assist them. Without one, you are on a uphill battle. Whatever company you ultimately decide, make sure you have good support from the leaders above you. Work daily with your coach.

Can you build your business via the internet? You would be surprised, but there are still many companies that do not allow direct advertising of their businesses. Part of the problem is a failure by the affiliate member making exaggerated claims on making money. The FTC has new rules in place and you better know up front that the old days of making exaggerated claims is gone. If you do and they find out, they will shut you down. If you live in another country, they can still go after your host provider or the company directly if they are in the US. So do yourself a favor now and don’t be a noob in making false claims.

Bottom line, if any company doesn’t allow you to utilize the power of the internet, I won’t even look at doing business with them. I don’t care how great there products or services are. I use the internet and it’s the way I do business. Many people like the other approaches like personal contacts, having 1 on 1 meetings. I find it archaic to build a business with so much great technology available today. I do see more companies having better videos that you can upload to your personal website and more companies are being forced to go this route if they wish to stay competitive.

Those companies that don’t adapt and change, will be left in the dust. Entrepreneurs have become busy savvy and demand much more from companies.

Compensation Plans – what type and how much are they paying out? This is probably the most problematic for most companies. Paying out a reasonable amount to stay competitive, yet being able to make a decent profit. Based on figures, it would seem that around 50 percent is a reasonable amount for both the affiliate member and company owners. After all, they took the risk and set up the infrastructure for your benefit. If a company states they will pay out anything about 50 percent, you really need to examine that, because in my opinion anything above 60 percent is a danger point for you and the company to stay viable long term.

So after you decide to go with a company, now what?

In other words, you need to formulate a plan of attack on how you will build your actual business. Like I stated above, I use the internet because I have the expertise to do so. Other’s may not be comfortable or have the necessary knowledge and will do it other ways like calling up their friends, family or buying leads. This is where the real work starts. Everything else you have done up to this point is gathering information, learning about the company and products.

The number one priority of any business is prospecting. It’s all a numbers game. Those that expose their business to the most people win. Plan and simple. People tend to over complicate this important and critical part of the process. They discuss at length, about saying this or that and what happens if the person sez this, what do I counter with.

The only way to get really good at prospecting is by actually doing it. Don’t try and shortcut this process, cause it will be an expensive and time consuming experiment if you do. Trust me, been there and done that. I got really good at prospecting because I have talked to literally thousands of people on the phone over the years. I never said having financial independence was easy, but it’s worthwhile.

If you don’t like the old fashion ways of building a business, like talking to friends and family or buy leads, then have a look at some other home based business ideas within a team environment

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1. Is Google Seeing your site?

Well, is G seeing your home based business opportunity site?

Is G indexing your site?

How would you know?

I would say if Google doesn’t know you exist, then how is anyone else going to find you? The answer is simple – they won’t. No traffic equals no sales. There are of course a number of ways to get your site noticed. Two key ways are adding good quality content to your website and adding good quality content all over the internet linking back.

2. How relevant is Page Rank?

With all the changes going on all the time, people are still consumed with page rank. Now don’t misunderstand what I am saying. Page rank still has some weight, but overall, it’s not a big deal in the scope of things. For example, I see sites higher up on page 1 than higher page ranked sites. Why? Good question so keep reading.

Google has de-valued page rank and another indicator is they removed it from the back of their analytics information as well. Too many people were gaming the system. It got so bad online that people would not link to other sites for fear they would loose some link love from G-man. That was never G’s overall plan and it really back fired against them in my opinion.

Now before you go off on a tangent and start cursing me, I will also acknowledge that a back link from a page 5 site, I would generally agree that it would have more weight than a page rank 1 site, but not always. I believe part of the reason is that page rank 5 site has been around for a couple of years and probably has lots of back links.

3. How related are your keywords to your website?

Oftentimes, you will see people having a lot of unrelated content on their site. Now if that’s your goal, that’s fine if you want to be a blogger. But, if you want to rank in the SERP’s, then you need to have your site focused on the keywords you are trying to get page 1 on. For example, if your site is about home based business ideas, then you want to find sites that are about home based business to get the best type of link pointing back to your site. Although it’s interesting to see that when you get a link from a real authority site, it doesn’t seem to matter. for instance, if you submitted a comment at a .edu or .gov site, I would bet it’s going to a quality back link. Even if its totally unrelated because Google give a lot of weight to sites like that.

By the way, don’t go and spam all the .edu sites because they will just end up deleting or closing the comments. When you comment at different sites, if you do at all, submit a quality comment that adds value to the discussion. If you like to do comment marketing, then find sites with do follow links, post a relevant comment and move on.

4. What you need to know about Paid Links

One thing that Google reminds us of is they hate paid links or do they? I have to question whether this is really accurate for a couple of reasons. Any major article directory like Ezine Articles and Go Articles have a paid membership and for a fee with Go Articles you can be on their high page rank location. so has G de-indexed them? Not at all. So I have to wonder if it’s more related to who you are online versus just being an obvious link paid farm. Ezine article also has a paid membership, which in essence could be argued as a paid link farm, but I am sure that Google will not be de-indexing that site anytime soon with over 15 million unique visitors per month and making G a ton of cash.

Just be careful about any obvious paid link farms and work on getting more quality unique content out to various directories. It is true, content

5. Outbound Links

How many do you have pointing elsewhere on a single page? It’s all about balance in my opinion. I do believe that to rank well, Google likes to see outbound links to other websites because it looks and feels more natural. Remember, the more links you have going out, the less link juice for all the links on that page. Rule of thumb – keep it to 10 or less links pointing to another site per page. Normally, I won’t have more than 5 actually.

6. Inbound Links – The Important Part

The most important part to really ranking well in the SERP’s. Its all about the quality of backlinks pointing to your site. Everything is gravy in my opinion. Try to make sure you get a keyword anchored text link pointing back because that has the most power for link juice.

7. Link Placement does matter

Since the updates from Google, its important to use text links within the body of your articles. The footers and side columns don’t get much link love from G anymore. Yes, it still counts, but not much because people could game the system to easily. In other words, G wants to level the playing field as much as possible and provide the best possible results back to their customers.

I still have links on the side columns for simplicity and functionality, but realize I am not getting too much link love from it.

8. To Follow or Not to Follow

Recently, I became really aware of this issue called do follow and no follow links. But first, you might be wondering what the heck I am referring to. When Google spiders or indexes your site, articles etc, they follow links that you have included in the article. However, some article directories for example include within their programming, an attribute called no follow. That means, when G finds your links on that particular site with ‘no follow’ attribute, they won’t pass any link juice back to your site.

Here’s a real life example when I used to post to a quality article directory called Bloglines because they had a page rank of 9 on their sites. I didn’t realize that when I posted my articles, the links are no follow. So basically I was doing Bloglines a big favor by posting good content, but not getting any SEO benefit in return.

9. Does Domain Age Matter?

Yes it does. Part of the reason is that Google places trust on a website that has aged for awhile. Spam sites are not usually sticking around for a few years from what I have seen and read. I recommend you buy and register your keyword focused domain for at least 2 years, preferably for 5 plus years is better.

When buying a domain, although not really expanded upon, try to ensure that your keywords are in the domain name. Google does count that as part of the overall strategy when ranking sites. Just like ensuring you include the keyword phrase in the title and randomly in your article. If you are going after make money, then your domain should include the phrase make money. I have always done and recommend this when buying domains, although this website is probably the exception.

Oh give me a little slack, I didn’t know anything about SEO 5 years ago, so I picked a nice sounding name. But this site does have age and the G-man will count it and has some good solid back links.

So basically you just want to ensure you are doing the right activities. Those that have the best quality inbound links win the ranking game. It’s really that simple on how to look at the SEO game. Write unique content, hyper link your targeted keywords within the article. Rinse and keep repeating till you hit the top of page 1.

Regards,

As time goes on and the internet matures, there is an exponentially increasing amount of new people coming online trying to make money online. Having said that, there is also a tendency for new people to go after the make money online or starting a home based business category to make so called easy money with Google Adsense.

If that describes you, then stop and take a breath for a minute. You won’t be able to compete in any major keyword category, especially if you are new to internet marketing. It takes a great deal of time, dedication and a steep learning curve to master the art and science of obtaining top positions on Google. You can if you are smart, focus your energy on the niche marketing area because there’s lots of low lying fruit that will make you money when first starting a home based business. Why go after the fruit on the very top, when you can pick it up from the ground?

That’s where I see the real money in the short term for anyone wanting to jump on the internet marketing game. With enough top position on low competitive keywords, you can in time make a full time income. For example, say you went after the term “home based business ideas” which is a fairly competitive term. It might provided you are building lots of back links to your main target site, 6 months, 12 months or longer to actually get on page 1 of G.

Why would you do that?

Well the simple answer is that you shouldn’t because it’s zapping productive time from you in building a solid home based business income. The goal is to make $1 a day, then $5 per day and so on. Small incremental amounts each day will win the race. This is a marathon folks, not some sprint.

So where do you begin on selecting the right niche market for you?

First, realize people will pitch you all kinds of nice software tools like Wordtracker and its only $55 per month. Ah, got news for you. Don’t waste your money. This is my opinion because I had purchased the program for a year and it never produced any more accurate keyword results than the free Google tools.

Say what?

Yup, you heard me correctly. G offers all kinds of amazing free tools, so why pay for something when you absolutely do not have too. Even their free keyword selector tool doesn’t give you an 100% accurate keyword summary. Its only an estimate for a reason. Life changes on the internet in micro seconds, not minutes. Click here to discover this yourself instead of relying on someone else.

Keyword Selection Ideas

Just type in the keyword that you want and see what results you get. For example, don’t type in home based business and think that’s the keyword. No, look at all the long tail keywords on the list. Usually there will be for something like that, a couple dozen long tail keywords like how to start a home based business. Now when you get your results, you want to pay attention to a few things. You will get a list of results initially including various long tail keywords in addition to your primary one that you entered. In addition, you will see to your right of the keywords, things like advertiser competition, monthly and global search results. You need to understand that its only an estimate and that’s where most people get lost.

Nowadays, I look for monthly search results below 5000 even. Why? Because there’s money to be made with Google Adsense and the competition is much lower. So why struggle for 2 years trying to get the big Kahuna of keywords, when there’s thousands of smaller islands with less people on them. Heck, I’m even looking at monthly search results of less than 1500 because I can usually get the page 1 within a short period of time and make money.

To get the full results of what you are really interested in when choosing your keywords, is to ensure you click the drop down menu selection and click on “choose column to display” is the “show estimated average CPC”. That will give you an estimate on the amount of money advertisers are paying. Now keep in mind its usually much lower, so if you see a keyword paying $10, you will only likely see 10 or 20$ of that in real dollars or less.

Google’s CPC Defined

According to Google, “Estimated Average Cost-per-click (CPC)
The system predicts the average cost each time a user clicks your ad on the associated keyword. The cost is specific to the position range shown in the Estimated Ad Position column”.

So what is the lowest CPC you should consider?

That’s an individual choice, but it should be above $1 for CPC. Many other’s would suggest go after ones that show a $3 to $5 range. The bottom line is you need to test this out and nothing else will really give you the necessary feedback you need to make decisions.

So when looking at choices of keywords, consider the competition you are going up against, your level of internet marketing experience, the estimated CPC, the monthly local and global search results.

People often times will pick the top paying keyword thinking, hey no problems, I will just go after that and bingo, be rolling in the dough. Wrong! Start with the lowest possible competitive terms, rank that on page 1 of Google, then rinse and repeat the process.

What happens over time, you will start getting that website to be an authority site, which is what you ultimately want. From what I have read and what I see going on the internet, especially with websites getting to page 1 is authority sites.

The game is constantly in flux and changing. That really is the only constant is change itself. So what worked in ranking well 2 or 3 years ago has likely changed. What has not changed fundamentally is writing good quality content and posting it to quality places. That’s in addition to of course placing unique content on your own website and building it up.

There are many people who want the A – Z step by step process on what exactly to do and what keywords should they pick. Sorry, why would I tell anyone what I’m going after. Never going to happen because I don’t want anymore competition than necessary. I like to help people though and I am by giving in my opinion up front advice on how to rank well in the search engines.

What I am telling you though is accurate information on how to do it. The other part of the equation is for you to actually get to work. So stop reading and get writing and posting your content all over the place. Of course, just don’t submit the same article, because Google will not count it for much anyways. Better off writing good original content that your readers will find useful and receive value for. That’s how you build a solid home based business opportunity business with Google Adsense.

Summing up this monster post

Choose a niche market that you want to go after. Then go to Google’s keyword selector tool, type your phrase in and check out the results. Look down the list and evaluate it to see how much CPC is for each phrase. Write some content around it. Post it at article directories, your own website and keep repeating that process till you rank on page 1 of Google. And that folks is how you create an income with Google Adsense and make money in a home based business.

Regards,