Home Business Online Opportunity

January 31, 2010 by affiliate starting line · 1 Comment
Filed under: Affiliate Starting Line 

How To Set Up a Home Business Online

If you find a home business online opportunity and decide to pursue it, you know you will be faced with lots of decisions. Many of them are the same decisions that are made when you set up an offline home business opportunity.

Business Organization

Among the first decisions to make will be what you are interested in setting up. Are you going to sell a product or a service? Are you going to be a Sole Proprietor or a C Corp? Maybe an S Corp is the right way to go. Whatever the decision, consulting with a small business expert or accountant is in order. You can usually find one through the small business bureau in your state government or through the Federal Small Business Administration office in your state. Some colleges and universities also have small business service offices. Whatever the venue, talk to someone who has the experience of starting up an independent home based business and preferably someone who has experience with Internet Marketing.

One way to do that is to join a local meet up group specializing in SEO, affiliate marketing or some aspect of Internet Marketing.  That is a great way to learn and make connections.

The point to realize is that you are not going to be perceived as the wonderful individual you are, but as a hard nosed capitalist out to make a buck. This perception is the same for the customer to whom you will be selling your product or service, and the government, local, state and Federal, who will see you as a source of tax revenue.

Tax ID

Once you have gotten by the business organization decision, the next step is to go on the site of the IRS and get yourself an EIN or tax ID number that can be used during the daily course of your business. This avoids the need to put your Social Security number on registration forms and provides your customers and business partners with a sense that they are dealing with a real business.

Internet Marketing or Affiliate Marketing

The next decision has to do with the nature of the home business online opportunity. If you are going to sell a product, then the affiliate marketing world is going to be the world you will need to master. Your choice will be to sell other people’s product or service in return for a commission or to create your own product or service to sell to the online world. Both of these options involve a host of skill sets and software packages that can be daunting for the newcomer.

To make it up the learning curve in this environment, you will need to research and work by trial and error to find the right affiliate training program for you.

Most affiliate training programs worth working with will have some price attached to the program. Some will charge a one time fee, others will charge a monthly charge. Whatever the fee structure, make sure the program comes with a written and video based tutorial that takes you through the steps of setting yourself up. This is vital because the process of setting up an online home based business is complex and time consuming, no matter what anyone tells you, and you have much better odds of making it with a well structured tutorial.

Even what I call a theme based program calls for a well defined tutorial. What I mean by theme is you will be designing a Web Site to sell your product or service as a one time business event. Unlike affiliate marketing where you will be setting up multiple Web sites and blogs to sell an inventory of affiliate products, with a theme based approach you will be concentrating your business around a single professional service or product and a single Web site and blog.

The Learning Curve

Whatever your choice, if you are new to the Web and Internet Marketing, you will need to pace yourself and deal with information overload during the course of your “training” and set up period.

There are lots of software and online tools you will need to pay for and learn as you move through the process. They all cost money and they all take time to learn how to use. There will be moments you will feel overwhelmed. Those are the moments you need to take a break to regenerate your batteries. Go out for a walk or go to a movie. Just get away from the computer and let things sink in. Joining a forum related to your business is a great way of dealing with the stress because you can communicate with others who are going through the same frustrations.

Overtime, the business will begin to emerge and income will begin to appear. That’s when things will start to pay off and you will feel confident about the future. If you can remain focused and concentrate on following your home business online opportunity plan or program tutorial, things will lead to your business growth and success.

Following the steps outlined above should help you get started on the right foot and get you to where you want to go in your Internet Marketing venture.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous

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Setting up an Online Home Business

January 25, 2010 by affiliate starting line · 3 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing for Beginners 

Home Business

Ode to Newbies who work at home

Abraham Lincoln was famous for his humorous and pithy remarks. One of them was; “You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”

In many ways, these words sum up the experience of the new marketer trying to make his or her way in the crazy world of Internet Affiliate Marketing. It is a frustrating, difficult, anxiety inducing and downright anger filled process of making your way through the barrage of information, up sell, cross sell, down sell, sideways sell and any kind of way sell to get to where you want to go. All this while trying to set up a home business.

“You may fool all of the people some of the time”

This is an interesting area of the IM process. The phenomenon is known as buzz marketing. The word goes out to all comers, new and old, experienced and newbies, that a hot new product is about to come out, and if you get in early, you will make the money before the crowd. So you sign up and join the forum for the new product launch and wait for the big deal product that was touted in the presell video. Well, surprise, surprise…it seems it isn’t quite ready yet so instead you can download eight reports and do some reading while you wait. You feel like a chump until you find a thread on the forum where some pros are complaining that they’ve been had. WOW, guys who know all about SEO, siloing, themeing and things you can’t understand have been had just like you. Thank the stars for the 30 day refund policy…hello Clickbank…bye, bye product. Off you go to the next “golden opportunity”.  Is that home business up and running yet?

“You can even fool some of the people all of the time”

This is the early stage newbie or new marketer entering the field. If you were like me you started with the simple desire to do data entry. So you pay your entry fee and find out the site isn’t about data entry. It’s an aggregator for all these affiliate sites that will make you a millionaire in three easy clicks…all for another fee of course. Some of these sites have a “system”. So you fork over another fifty bucks and get a sixty page PDF all about Click Bank or Paydotcom or whatever. But no system. OK so you learned a few things you didn’t know but you’re no closer to making a living, not by a long shot. Though you learn fast enough to avoid the pot hole again, the nature of the Web is there are thousands of newcomers right behind you ready to hit that hole just like you did. If they’re lucky they might join a forum and read one of your comments, but more likely than not, they are just going to have to go through the gauntlet just like you did.  By the way no home business just yet!

“But you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”

If you make it to this stage, that is, if you have the time, money, and determination to hang in there and work the forums and ask a lot of questions, you’ll soon begin to see things more clearly. The scams with lousy graphics, endless sales pages that don’t tell you what they charge, the so called “free” offers that are never free, will soon be more obvious to you. You might even find a system that works for you. If you are into sales, maybe it’s a product marketing system that teaches you to buy resell rights and shows you how to set up your business. Maybe it’s a Web site building system that teaches you to create you own business out of your hobby or passion. Whatever it is, you have now developed the instincts and ability to see through the smoke. You keep your emotions in check and coolly test and cancel promotions based on your well learned lessons of product quality and market knowledge you now possess. You may not be making a fortune and you may even not be earning anything yet; but you are on your way because you can lay out a realistic plan to develop your home business.

In many ways, online business is no different than offline business, except that in the former, you work at your own pace and answer to only one boss…YOU!

So keep up the hard work and may your travels be prosperous.

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Market Research:Do You Know Where Your Internet Market Is?

January 18, 2010 by affiliate starting line · 1 Comment
Filed under: Affiliate Starting Line 

Internet Marketing: Look Before You Leap

Market Research

As you decide to develop an internet business campaign, you will want to do some basic market research to see what people are looking for online.  It can be information to solve a particular problem like a sore neck or it can be a hard product like a snowboard for their winter vacation.

So off you go to see what the market trends are what is selling. Next comes the follow up.

Before you decide to begin your marketing campaign you need to choose a product or service. Once you have done that you should begin to define who your customer is and then do more research on the customer profile.

Customer Profile

Elements that go into your customer profile are age, sex, economic status, ethnic background; in other words, descriptors that can influence the decision to buy.

Customer Demand

Next, you want to find out what need your product or service will satisfy. For that, you want to get an idea of a problem or situation that will drive demand. Does your customer profile make a good target for what you will be offering as an affiliate marketer?

Market Size

You also need to research the size of your market and what segments of that market are more apt to demand what you have to offer. There could be a revenue stream designed for each clearly defined segment of your target population.

Your research should also look into market size and growth over the near and long term. Is demand going to increase or decrease? If it is going to change over time; how can you best position yourself for future growth?

What system can you develop to get constant feedback in order to stay on top of the changes in demand?

Competition

You will also have to get a good idea of the competitive landscape to see who your competition is and how they are serving your target population. For this you will want to do Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat Analysis (or SWOT for short) in order to increase your chances of positioning yourself for greater success. You need to develop a very strong understanding of where your competition is coming from to position your product or service in the marketplace.

Conclusion

If you take the time to follow these steps, you will be better prepared to have your affiliate marketing campaign deliver results and drive your business forward.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous

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