Work At Home Instead of At Work!

The information super highway is quickly becoming the
revenue super highway. Online, work-at-home
opportunities are as common as pigeons in New York.
Thousands of people are quitting their jobs, working
from home and making money. If you have the motivation
and some extra time, you can start own work-at-home
online business.

So far this probably sounds like one of those e-mails
you always delete advertising one of these so-called
online businesses. Don’t worry. I’m not trying to sell
you anything or even suggesting a specific online
business that lets you work at home. This article is
to let you know about some of the options. It’s up to
you to decide what will work for you.

USE YOUR PRIOR TRAINING OR SKILLS
TO FREELANCE

No matter what your expertise is: writing, coding,
painting, or contorting your body into odd shapes,
there are websites out there designed to help you find
jobs in that field that let you work at home. These
sites operate in different ways. Some post job
opportunities and allow members to bid on them while
others post jobs and have respondents contact the
clients directly. Some charge membership fees, some
don’t. Sites like craigslist.com or writerlance.com
are wonderful examples of places to find freelance
jobs that will let you work at home. Search engines
are your friends when looking for a site that caters
to your particular skills set. If you look hard
enough, you’re sure to find something.

WRITE ABOUT YOUR FIELD

Enter the wonderful world of blogging. Over the course
of your life, you’ve learned a lot, both from success
and failure. Maybe you know the best way to filet a
salmon or how to count cards so the casino monitors
can’t catch you. You’d be surprised how many people
are dying to know this information. If you have a
halfway decent ability to write, consider starting a
blog. If you can get people reading your blog, you can
make money, no matter what you write about. The
writing is only the bait. It’s what you include with
the writing that is the food on your plate.

When you’re writing, think about your audience. Target
your articles to a niche group, and then target all of
your money making plans to that group. People are more
responsive to a targeted campaign than a general one.
Don’t worry. I’m getting to how to actually make the
money.

HERE IT IS, THE MONEY MAKING PART OF YOUR
WORK AT HOME BUSINESS!

There are a number of ways to make money online, both
using a blog and not. One way is affiliate marketing.
With affiliate marketing, you put a link to someone
else’s site somewhere online, and the linked site pays
you per click or a commission on every sale or
registration. Affiliate marketing is great if you have
a blog, especially if you’ve managed to acquire a
readership. However, you don’t have to be a blogger to
take advantage of affiliate marketing. You can post
the links on message boards or forums all over the
Internet. Affiliate marketing can be a work at home
business by itself.

Another opportunity is actually buying and selling
things online. Books have been written about how to
make money on e-bay or other auction sites, and for
some this might be a viable home business. Others of
you might have your own products to sell. Maybe you
take nature photography or are in a band or do arts
and crafts. Well, sell your photographs or struggling
demo CD or those personalized dream-catchers online.
Set yourself up a website, either by using a website
design program, learning html, or hiring someone to
design it for you (if you’re smart, you’ll look to a
local college and see if you can find a student
looking for experience who would work for a reduced
price or as a class project). Once you get your
website up, you can do the rest of the marketing and
selling work at home in front of your computer.

Online communities like Myspace or Friendster can be
excellent tools to help you get your product onto the
Internet market. Tapping into Myspace is tapping into
millions of people worldwide. So if you’re trying to
sell that CD or those photographs, join several of
these online communities and market to the other
members. Just remember to fo us your profile around
your product and business. You’ll be amazed what you
can accomplish having a community that size at your
fingertips.

HAVE A PLAN

No matter which online work at home opportunity you
choose, make sure that you think about it. Do real
research into the ones you are using. Find out how
other people have succeeded and failed. Make a
concrete, long term business plan with short term,
achievable goals. The people who wander haphazardly
about the Internet, flitting from online business to
online business are the ones who don’t make much
money. If you take the time to do it right, to make a
plan and have a direction, then you can be one of
those who work at home and still make money.

David Hudson, webmaster of webcashlink,
business articles author, and a successful affiliate,
can help you with your online business.
Visit: Webcashlink

Do I Need Promotional Business Products?

That depends on how serious you are with your business
venture. Is this a de facto hobby, or a true business
that you plan to grow, market and make successful? If
you fall under the second category, then you might
seriously consider getting some promotional business
products. They can make the difference in acquiring
and keeping customers.

If you’re reading this article, chances are that your
business is primarily online, so there might be other
questions for you to consider if you decide you do
need promotional products. What kind of customers are
you dealing with? Do you have interaction with them
through the mail, via the Internet, or even
face-to-face? Depending on how you interact with your
customers, you may want to choose different kinds of
promotional items.

Make sure that your promotional business products mesh
with your marketing strategy and message, meet with
your client needs, and won’t bring down your business.
Be careful not to fall into any of these traps when
choosing.

DON’T PURCHASE THROW AWAYS

If you’re going to spend money on something, it should
be worthwhile. Make sure that your client will use the
product. Don’t sacrifice quality. If you’re going to
buy pens to give away, make sure that they are good
pens that write well. If they aren’t, the client will
throw them away and won’t see your name every time he
needs to write down a phone number.

DON’T BLEND INTO THE CROWD

Be creative. Try to find a product that speaks to what
your company is and that your clients will appreciate.
If you think you can pull it off, try to make your
promotional items funny without losing relevance.
Nothing would be better for business than for Jim to
show Bobby the hilarious promotional items that you
gave him. Now Bobby has been exposed to your company
and will be more likely to contact you.

DON’T BUY PROMOTIONAL BUSINESS PRODUCTS
THAT ARE NOT RELEVANT

Make your promotional business products relevant to
your company and part of your overall marketing
strategy. If you run a nature photography website,
mail key chains with one of your nature photographs
attached. All of your promotional business products
should remind customers of what you do and the quality
of your work. Don’t settle for a product with just
your name on it. Make sure the product says something
about you.

DON’T FORGET ABOUT YOUR BEST CUSOMTERS

If possible, tailor some promotional business products
to your better clients. Try to get something a bit
nicer for the people who buy $300 worth of ad space a
week on your website. And make sure that it is
something that this client will truly appreciate. If
your best client is a kayak tour company, give them
waterproof compasses, not magnets. Don’t ever spend so
much time and effort trying to acquire new customers
that you forget to keep your established customers
happy.

DON’T FORGET ABOUT THE AGE IN WHICH
WE LIVE

Technologies are constantly changing and being
created. Take advantage of that. A good promotional
business item might be an e-mailed screensaver or a
personalized widget for your customer’s desktop.
Promotional items can be downloaded, in CD form, or
just on a website. Be creative. The better and more
memorable your promotional business products, the more
customers and revenue they will bring you.

David Hudson, webmaster of webcashlink,
business articles author, and a successful affiliate,
can help you with your online business.
Visit: Webcashlink

Use Ezine Marketing To Boost Traffic or Profits

You’ve probably seen them advertised or subscribed to
a few. E-zines seem to be sweeping the Internet and
filling mailboxes. Maybe you’ve thought about creating
your own for your site, but decided against it for any
number of reasons. Maybe you didn’t see how e-zine
marketing could help. Maybe you decided that
maintaining an e-zine would be too much work. Maybe
you didn’t think anyone would pay to subscribe, and
why go through all that work for free? Well, here are
some responses to your excuses.


E-ZINE MARKETING WON’T BOOST SITE TRAFFIC

You’ve probably got repeat users on your site; those
dedicated few who check up on you everyday to read any
new posts no matter what. Obviously an e-zine won’t
make them come back more frequently. They already
visit every day! How much more do you want them to
view your site?

Then you’ve probably got those people who check you
out once in awhile when they think of it. Those people
might only visit the site once a month. What if they
had subscribed to your e-zine because they liked your
site so much and received it in their mailbox once a
week? Wouldn’t that remind them to go visit the site
more?

And what about that one time user who came to your
site, loved it, and then suffered from a minor head
injury and partial amnesia and forgot all about your
site. No traffic from this person. But what if they
had subscribed to your e-zine? The reminder would be
sitting in their mailbox, which they had stored the
username and password for in case they did succumb to
partial amnesia, and they would once again be able to
visit your site. And who knows? Maybe visiting your
site could trigger all of their memories to return.
You’d be seen as the hero you are, all thanks to an
e-zine.

And if you simply mail out the password to subscribers
and have the e-zine posted on your site, then every
time a subscriber reads the e-zine, they add one more
hit to the site.

E-zines are a regular reminder to Internet users that
your site is still around and worth checking out.


AN E-ZINE WON’T MAKE ME ANY MONEY AND
ISN’T WORTH MY TIME

Oh contraire. E-zine marketing can and does produce
revenue. Ignore the fact that in the last section I
showed you how e-zines increase site traffic and thus
revenue. Think for a moment about affiliate marketing.
What if you place some of your affiliate marketing
links within the e-zine? By doing that you are sending
your revenue generators directly to mailboxes instead
of being forced to wait for consumers to come to you!

Also, who said that the e-zine has to be free, or that
you can’t have an upgraded e-zine available for a
small fee? The upgraded version could have extra
articles, more frequency or other nifty features that
people would be dying to pay for. If people like what
you have to say, then they will be willing to pay for
it.


AN E-ZINE WOULD BE TOO HARD TO PRODUCE

As with so many things on the Internet, you have to
remember that you’re not alone. There is an entire
market out there of people whose job it is to help you
market online, and e-zine marketing is no different.
There are websites out there that you can buy articles
from to post and sites devoted to writers trying to
find freelance jobs just like writing for your e-zine.
Programs can be downloaded to help you with your
formatting, and contact lists in e-mail programs make
mass mailing a cinch.

I am not saying that creating an e-zine will be as
easy as eating a sandwich, but it can be done without
an obscene amount of work. The benefits are absolutely
worth the cost in time or money. In today’s Internet,
e-zine marketing is a tool that cannot be ignored.

David Hudson, webmaster of webcashlink,
business articles author, and a successful affiliate,
can help you with your online business.
Visit: Webcashlink

Improve Your Online Business with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

So you’ve got that wonderful work-at-home online
business up and running. You’ve got a dynamite website
with easy to use navigation, a slew of well written,
entertaining and pertinent articles, and more
revenue-generating links than you can handle. But for
some reason, the hits just aren’t coming and your
business isn’t making as much money as you deserve.
How do you turn a struggling online business into a
profitable online business?

The first thing you have to ask yourself is, ‘How are
people hearing about my site?’ In an Internet
dominated by search engines like Google and Yahoo,
high search engine ranking is a must. Why? Most search
engines show ten results per page, ranked in order,
and most users never make it past the first page. That
means that if your website is going to be found, it
needs to be top 10. But how? How!? Take a look at the
title of this article. That’s right. Through search
engine optimization.

SEO is a simple concept. Use the words that people
will probably enter into search engines strategically
in the content of your website. This article is using
a couple of SEO keywords, like Online Business or
Search Engine Optimization, the very subjects people
might search for if looking for an article like this.
See how easy it is? Two more keywords without
interrupting the flow of the article!

Using search engine optimization effectively may mean
redesigning most of the content on your website. When
you’re doing that try to keep in mind these Six
Commandments of SEO.

THOU SHALT KNOW THINE ENEMIES

Knowing what keywords to use is the most important
part of SEO. This means research. Lots of research.
Start off by trying to find your site on various
search engines. Chances are you won’t, at least not on
the first page. Write down the top 10 results you do
get. These sites are your competition. Try a few
different combinations of search terms. Are there any
sites that appear more than once? Check those out.
What keywords or phrases are used over and over? What
are the titles of pages? What is the content about?
What is the web address? These are potential keywords
Record them. These will be the basis for your own
search engine optimization.

THOU SHALT NOT USE KEYWORDS WANTONLY

Keywords should be thought of as compliments; the more
you give, the less meaning they have. By the same
token, not giving enough won’t get you noticed. Use
them wisely. Find that happy ratio of keywords to
normal. A general rule of thumb in search engine
optimization is 2.5-4% of your content should be
keywords; no more, no less.

THOU SHALT MAKE SURE ALL CONTENT IS SENSIBLE

Don’t fall SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION into the
tempting ONLINE BUSINESS trap of SEARCH ENGINES using
keywords randomly SEO in order to increase your search
engine rank. Tough to read, wasn’t it? Kinda made you
want to scream and tear your hair out? Content above
keywords. If your articles are so keyword rich that
they don’t make sense, users won’t return and you’ll
lose repeat revenue. All the search engine
optimization in the world is useless if your users
don’t stay on the site long enough to put cash in your
pocket. Search engines pick up on this tricks anyway.
Besides, it’s just plain dirty fighting.

THOU SHALT VARY KEYWORD USAGE

So you’ve done your research and have a list of 25
keywords you want to use in your site. Each article
has a primary keyword or two. Unfortunately, every
article on the site is using the same two keywords.
What about the other 23? Don’t let yourself be tempted
by the ease of using the same words over and over.
Write articles about all 25 keywords. You spent all
that time researching them, now use them! And just
because one article is about one keyword doesn’t mean
you can’t use other keywords in the article. Use the
non-primary keywords like salt sprinkled over the
entire site.

THOU SHALT UPDATE

Getting that number one search engine rank was hard.
It took hours of work, and now that you’ve reached the
pinnacle it’s time to sit back and reap the benefits.
Right?

WRONG!

How long do you think that number one ranking will
last? You know your competitors got mad when you beat
them and are redesigning their sites right now. Right
now, I say! Eventually they’ll pull ahead of you
again, unless you manage to stay ahead in the game.
Update your site constantly with new keyword rich
content to make sure that you’re on the cutting edge
and can keep that number one ranking.

NEVER FORGET: THOU ART NOT ALONE

Search engine optimization can seem like a daunting
task at first, and maybe it is. But never forget that
there are people out there willing and able to help
you; it is, after all, how they make a living. Some
writers specialize in SEO and there are websites
available that do most of the research grunt work just
waiting to hear from you. So no matter how daunting a
task it may seem, don’t ever give up on search engine
optimization. In an internet where everything depends
on page hits, your search engine rank can never be too
high.

David Hudson, webmaster of webcashlink,
business articles author, and a successful affiliate,
can help you with your online business.
Visit: Webcashlink