Do you have a dream to make money from the comfort of your own home? There are many home based business ideas that you can use to get your business started, but you have to be sure you choose one that is right for you.It can be difficult to find the right idea for you when you don’t know what they are, but there are many different ideas that can be found on the internet. To help you get started, below are a few of the ideas that anyone can get a business started with easily.One: Network marketing – This is also referred to as MLM and many people are skeptical about using it to start a business. If you take the time to thoroughly research the network marketing opportunities online, then you can very easily find a good one that is legitimate.The mistake that many people make that leaves them skeptical about this type of business is choosing the first one that they find. You can’t do this because you have to ensure it is legitimate and profitable for you before using one of these opportunities to start a business.Two: Affiliate marketing – There are thousands of affiliate programs online that you can join for free and get started promoting to help you make money at home. You want to be sure you choose programs that you believe in and like so you don’t end up struggling to make money with it.Three: Sell your own products or services – If you like creating products of your own like, candles, gift baskets, jewelry, cookies, or other types, then this may be the best idea for you.There are many people online that will pay for different skills such as, writing, web design or copywriting. If your skill is in demand, then this can easily be a profitable business for you to start.Four: Niche marketing – You can find many products that you can promote in specific niches and use them to start a business for that one niche. You have to be sure that you only promote quality products and that you enjoy the idea that you chose so you don’t have to struggle to make money.Five: Business opportunities – There are many different business opportunities online that you can choose to start a business. Be sure you look at as many of the opportunities that you can find before choosing the one to use to help you earn money from the comfort of your home.These are just a handful of the home based business ideas that you can find online to get your business started with. You want to be sure that you choose one that you will enjoy building a successful business with because this will make it much easier for you to achieve that goal.

A business opportunity in home based business is something which is in high demand in this hurry-up, rat-race world of ours. Hundreds of hours are spent commuting to and from jobs, hundreds of dollars are spent on fuel for transportation, parking fees, and general wear and tear on our cars and trucks. An expensive wardrobe is something which many women worry about when they are have jobs in the corporate world, although men often are in this same dilemma. Could there be a better way to have a comfortable lifestyle, provide for the family, and get away from some of the insanity of the modern-day work place?With so many choices of business opportunity in home based business today, especially when one considers what is on the Internet, the mind can be sent into overload. Is a business which is run out of the spare bedroom the best choice, or should one consider building a separate building for an office? Is this new home based business one which will disrupt the family if done inside the home, or is the home too much of a distraction to get the work done which is required to be successful in the home business world? Often a home will have a barely used attic or basement which could be turned into that home office, and many times something of this nature, which is more set apart from the main activities of day-to-day life in the home, can offer a better working environment. No matter where the office is located, there is some nitty-gritty discipline required to work from home.Which comes first in the business opportunity in home based business, the chicken or the egg? Is it best to decide on a home business before deciding on where to place it in the home, or is it best to start setting aside a great space for a future office at home, after which you pursue the dream of being your own boss? Both options are probably on equal footing; one of the most important things to do is make those goals, write them on a goal board where they are visible on a daily basis, and then take the massive action to achieve those goals. Pondering and planning and goal setting without action will only lead to frustration and, most likely, failure. There is a certain amount of ”Just Do It” that is required in the world of Business Building At Home.

There are probably thousands of home businesses you could choose, but how do you choose the right one? Well this article should help, you see I have already done all the investigations into finding a successful home business for you, so take note as I reveal the different types, which are scams? and whether there is a business model out there for YOU!So What Suits YOU? During your research you should really ask yourself what type of business would suit your lifestyle? I mean, lets say that you have children still at school, that could certainly rule out Forex or Commodity trading, as you must be able to monitor your trading screen pretty much ALL the time, AND THIS IS OBVIOUSLY NOT SUITABLE OR CONGUSIVE to the school run is it? So start by writing down EXACTLY what it is you want from your home business, what you enjoy and how much time you can commit to it, especially in the early days.Make sure that your business of choice is in an area which is of interest to you, working with something that you are passionate about will help you to discipline yourself to do whatever is necessary to succeed, and will help you soldier on when the inevitable roadblocks appear (and they WILL).Make sure the home based business you are thinking of starting is a legitimate one. Many MLM’s for example, in my opinion are bordering on the illegal, so do your due diligence, check out the owners, find out what their motives are, talk to the users of the systems and find out what the success ratio is.There are a lots of reviews posted around the Internet these days on just about everything you could think of, so utilise this resource and gather as much info as you can BEFORE making your decision.How Do I Start A Home Based Business?What about Support? One of the fastest ways to shorten the home business learning curve is to have access to, and the support of, a mentor. There are many home business systems out there which will promise you support and mentoring, but will dramatically fall short on this very important aspect, so another positive to look for is to ensure that any home business you are looking at starting gives you all of the support and training you will need to succeed, but more importantly provides you with the proof that they do, BEFORE you commit.What about cost? Even though running a home based business can be considerably cheaper to start than a traditional bricks and mortar business, there will still be costs, and anyone who tells you otherwise is talking nonsense.For example, you will need a Website and hosting, and you will probably need a marketing budget, as the fastest way for you to get results and start making money, will be to do some paid advertising. But this will really be a decision only you can make based on how quickly you need to see a return on your investment. There are many FREE marketing strategies you can use as well, but these tend to be more long-term, and WILL NOT produce big results quickly. I recommend implementing both free and paid marketing personally.How Do I Start A Home Based Business?Finally, you simply MUST Create a business plan. You know the old adage “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”, and this is very true. I have seen many businesses fail simply because they did not have a strategy to work with and therefore could not measure how they were doing. So set-up a plan for your home based business and follow through with it. Again when deciding what business system to invest in, check out the advice you are given on this subject and use this as part of your criteria when making your decision. Any legitimate home based business system SHOULD have within their support program, ALL the advice you would need to help you to create a good business plan to suit YOU.I would like to leave you now with a final piece of advice. Follow your plan through and take consistent daily action. Many people have the right idea and start out with the right intent, but fail to take the necessary actions. And remember that a business, whether it’s a home based business or not cannot succeed overnight.Nothing about running your own home based business will be easy, but if you take my advice and stick to it YOU WILL improve your chances of success a hundredfold.All the best.
-Jon

One of the excellent ways to get connected and engaged with your clients is using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. However, people claim that email marketing no longer remains effective and relevant because of the success of social media.

Stop listening to them, as these are just misconceptions. Email marketing is still alive and doing well as one of the most effective and powerful techniques of online marketing and being in touch with your clients.

Defining Email Marketing

Firstly, you must know what email marketing is, before moving towards the reasons explaining why it is so useful in business.

When a person visits your website and thinks of subscribing to your mailing list with the aim to keep in touch with you through email, it is known as email marketing. A mailing list like this is quite important if you are selling a service or product. Email marketing enables you to build customer loyalty, earn trust and promote brand awareness while encouraging your subscribers to purchase from you more often.

Email marketing has several benefits. Although, it is a great marketing tool however, unfortunately, it seems to possess a bad reputation with a few businesses, who fail to understand it fully.

Some companies are of the view that people immediately consider finding an email from a stranger and they delete it, thinking badly about their company.

This may be true to some extent, chiefly because businesses have failed to take the time for nurturing their list. Nevertheless, with responsible marketing, an email marketing campaign can be made to work exceptionally well for your business.

Email Marketing Against Social Media Marketing

As explained earlier, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are superb ways to connect with both existing and potential clients. They are ideal platforms to go for word of mouth advertising, creating strong bond with your current audience and putting yourself in front of a new audience.

Both of these tools are necessary for your business. However, you cannot keep a check over who is seeing your updates or when they are seen.

Apart from this, you cannot control these connections fully, as social media sites like Twitter, Facebook keep making changes without notifying how they could affect the way you are connecting with your followers.

Social media sites do not provide you the opportunity to connect people one-on-one as you can connect through emails. Using email marketing, your promotional campaigns can be fine-tuned by you, while forming a list of people who show genuine interest in whatever you are offering.

With Twitter for example, your message is competing with hundreds or even thousands of other Tweets from companies promoting similar products or services to yours. The same is true on Facebook.

Even if you have a huge number of fans, they certainly are following other pages as well, which reduces your message’s effect. The same thing is true about emails but by sending a personalized email, you can gain their attention as they would actually open and read your email. The distractions present on social networks including recent status updates, chat options and new photos are not there in email marketing.

For this reason, it is important for you to make an effort and transform your followers into your email-marketing list as soon as possible. Once it is done, you have full control and authority as they are in the list of YOUR contacts. You will lose them only if they choose to unsubscribe from your email list.

How Can You Make Your Social Network Followers to Subscribe Your List?

It is not at all difficult. You just have to provide them with the reason for joining you. For instance, offer them something for which they would not mind giving their email address is a good idea.

You could offer a how-to guide, special offer or an answer addressing a particular issue or problem that is bothering your audience, exclusive information or special type of voucher or discount, especially for all your email subscribers.

You must select something that is not only of real value to your email subscribers, but is also of interest to your target audience.

Such actions are not enough to keep your email list active and interested. To avoid losing these valuable connections, you are required to think how you can constantly deliver information that help them remain engaged and persuade them to open the email sent by you.

Consider Your Email Subscribers as Royalty

Customers visiting your offline business or contacting you over the phone, have high expectations that they will be treated rightly and in a special way. Undoubtedly, when you deal with your customers face-to-face, you get recognized for superb customer service and for offering an excellent buying experience. What you should do is, offer the same experience to your email marketing contacts.

When a person heads towards you by subscribing and trusting you with his/her email address, he is in fact conveying you that he likes whatever you are offering and wants to know you more.

Think of it this way, you have been invited by them into their inbox. Therefore, it is your responsibility that this relationship and trust should not be abused by the bombardment of your sales pitches that keep promoting your services and products. You must nurture your email list. Try to be helpful as well as informative and send news and offers, which you consider that they like to know about.

Do not consider your mailing list like a group of faceless names. Keep in mind your ideal customer and exchange thoughts with them one to one. This makes your emails more informative and personal, strengthening the bond with your target audience.

Design a Newsletter

A perfect way to remain in touch with your email list is a newsletter. It gives you an ideal mix of updates, news, information and special offers about your business to develop engagement with the subscribers and enables them to know more about you. Newsletter is also a superb way of encouraging calls to action, may be with limited time offer.

The main purpose is to make available the relevant information, which your ideal clients want to read. However, you should be careful about not to make them bored. The information should be passionate and interesting.

Establish a Strong Bond with Your Subscribers

With the passage of time, your connection with your subscribers will grow. As it becomes stronger, the loyalty of your subscribers to your business increases and consequently, your business sales and profits get a boost. Your company will get new referrals, opportunities and mutually beneficial associations together with building new customer base.

Your Business Gets Repeat Business with Email List

If you do not use the internet world, you might go for placing an advertisement in your local newspaper or investing in flyers or using any other advertising media.

Here, you capture new customer only if a good number of people see your advertisement. However, an email list provides you the opportunity to bond and nurture with your subscribers and in the long run, you successfully form a base of loyal customers who like to purchase from you repeatedly.

Email marketing is undoubtedly one of the most effective tools for establishing a large core of new clients online apart from your regular local clients in your business.

If you realize how powerful it could be to send out emails, which result in gaining extra sales as well as leads, you will eventually be able to formulate a marketing campaign making your business more profitable than before.

Cheapest as well as Effective Advertising Technique

Nevertheless, email marketing is one of the lucrative ways for promoting any business. With the passage of time, you can form a mailing list with numerous potential customers who show deep interest in whatever you are offering by giving you their email address.

Communicating with your subscribers is absolutely free and each of your email results in huge sales.

Underestimating the Power of Email Marketing is a Mistake

Email marketing tool is neither dead nor obsolete. Email marketing provides you more control and access over the message. In fact, by giving their email address, subscribers actually permit you to contact them. This action reveals their interest in whatever you have to offer.

Through email marketing, you are provided with the opportunity to form a strong relationship with your subscribers. This relationship is the one that empowers you as people like doing business with people. Looking after your list properly means your subscribers will like you more and trust as well. Ultimately, you are provided with a much better opportunity of increasing sales than your competitors.

Now you have understood the power of email marketing, you can create and run campaigns yourself and continue to establish a stronger bond with your online customers.

Becoming successful in creating a winning email marketing campaign and establishing a relationship with your customers, is surely a big achievement of yours. This is because, you actually become successful in winning their trust and acquiring their email address is definitely a huge and a rewarding responsibility.

If you do it properly, you will see your business profits bar rise. If you do it badly, you will see your business sales to decrease and it may also damage your brand reputation.

6 Tips to Make Your Email Marketing Campaigns Productive

It Should be Interesting

Make sure you have included lots of valuable information in all your messages. It should be in a way that captures your reader’s interest. Avoid sending out sales pitches or making it only about you. Add information that is actually interesting and useful for your target audience. If your subscribers think that you send emails only with the aim of enhancing your sales, they will never feel special or valued and you will fail to stop them from hitting the delete button, or unsubscribing from your list. They will not bother giving a look to your email messages any more.

Provide a Visible Link for Unsubscribing

You might consider it as a negative approach, but it is in fact a positive one. Your readers feel comfortable when they feel that they have full control and are not being pressurized to do anything. Therefore, never forget to include a link for unsubscribing in your email. Trying to hide it or not providing any link will only earn you frustration and anger of your subscribers, leading you to achieve completely opposite results of what you want to achieve.

Ask for Feedback

Feedback from your audience is necessary to make your relationship with them stronger and to enhance your email marketing projects. Therefore, keep asking for opinions, suggestions or feedback from your readers. Another way to receive passive feedback is through email marketing programs that track information regarding the number of people opening up your emails, or clicking on the links present there. All such feedbacks are essential for you to continuously improving and engaging with your audience.

Targeting the Right People

It is important to target the right people to achieve fruitful results. If you keep sending your emails to wrong customers, you will achieve nothing but their aggression and annoyance. Targeting wrong audience is simple a wastage of time of both, you and the targeted people. It is better to put in your efforts and time in your campaigns targeting audience who is actually interested in hearing from you.

Try Making Your Email Messages Mobile Friendly

In this technological world, your customers now can access their email messages on their tablets or mobiles. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that you format your emails correctly to ensure that you can read them easily.

Make Exclusive Offers Only for Your Mailing List Subscribers

You can show your gratitude to your subscribers by sending exclusive special offers, which is not available anywhere on your website. Such offers can be free delivery, discounts or any other deal that attract your customers encouraging them to buy from you.

Our next lesson covers the main items for online advertising. Advertising is probably the most important promotion tool for big brick-and-mortar companies. However, with a SEM businesses, advertising is only a supporting factor. The problem is that the majority of SEM businesses lack the scale to be able to effectively contact large numbers of prospects and clients. Furthermore, there aren’t many places on the Web where prospective clients come in flocks. Therefore, advertising is largely PPC-oriented.

Actually, online advertising is advertising on the Internet. This particular form of advertising is a source of revenue for an increasing number of websites and companies.

A significant number of firms, from small businesses to multinational corporations, incorporate online advertising into their marketing strategy. Online advertisements typically involve at least two separate firms: the advertiser or agency which purchases or sponsors the advertisement and the publisher or network which distributes the ad for display. Because of the close relationship between technical innovation and online advertising, many firms specialize in both. For example, most search engines couple their search service with an advertising program, exploiting the benefits of keyword-based search technology by including ads in search results.

Let’s look closer on the most popular online advertising form as traditional banner. PPC advertising form will be explained in details in 8 lessons of our next Step.

Traditional Banner
A Web banner or banner ad is a widely used form of advertising on the Internet. This kind of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a Web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking them to the advertiser’s website.

Generally the advertisement is constructed from an image (GIF, JPEG, PNG), JavaScript program or multimedia object employing technologies such as Java, Shockwave or Flash, and often employing animation or sound to maximize presence. Images are usually in a high-aspect ratio shape. Banners are usually placed on Web pages that have interesting content, such as a newspaper article or an opinion piece.

The Web banner is displayed when a Web page that references the banner is loaded into a Web browser. This event is known as an “impression”. When the viewer clicks on the banner, the viewer is directed to the website advertised in the banner. This event is known as a “click-through”. Many banner ads work on a click-through payback system.

At the base of a click-through system are mathematical calculations of the number of users (users clicking on an ad) divided by impression number. We remember that the term impression means the number of times the ad was delivered. For example, if your banner ad was delivered 100 times (impressions delivered) and 1 person clicked on it (clicks recorded), then the resulting CTR would be 1%.

It should be noted that banner ad click-through rates have fallen over time, often measuring significantly less than 1% and choice of an appropriate advertising site with high affinity is very important crucial factor in this situation. Personalized ads, unusual formats, and more obtrusive ads typically have higher click-through rates than standard banner ads.

When the advertiser scans their log files and detects that a Web user has visited the advertiser’s site from the content site by clicking on the banner ad, the advertiser sends the content provider a small amount of money (usually around five to ten US cents). This payback system is often how the content provider is able to pay for the Internet access to supply the content in the first place.

Nine Common Banner Ad Mistakes to Avoid
Banner advertising expert Rob Frankel advises e-marketers to avoid the following mistakes when creating their banner ads:

Overloaded. Too many colors. Too slow to load. Too hard to read. Nobody wants to grow old waiting for your banner ad to load. Frankel advises designing banner ads that will load and view easily with last year’s technology. “Personally, I design pages for people running no more than Netscape 2.0 on the equivalent of a 486 running at 66 MHz and 256 colors,” says Frankel. “That means your art should still be no deeper than eight bits, unless you’re a true minimalist and can bring it in at no more than four.”
Unattractive. People like good-looking stuff. What works for Cindy Crawford can work for you, too. So if you’re not a digital Da Vinci, find someone who is and pay him or her a few bucks to make your banner look great.
Too many bells and whistles. Just because technology offers you bells and whistles doesn’t mean you have to use every one of them. Chances are that the average Web surfer has been through several sites before he or she gets to your banner. Give the reader a break. Don’t overdo motion, movement, or message changes. And allow some time to digest what you’re displaying.
Illiteracy and illegibility. These are the ads that make you scrunch up your face and twist your head trying to make some sense out of the illegible scrawls that some knucklehead thinks are cool. But prospects don’t care how cool you think it looks. If they can’t read it, you’ve lost any chance of their clicking on it.
Missing link. Your banner looks great but isn’t linked to anything. That’s a mistake that anyone should be able to detect and prevent with a simple check.
Link errors. Your banner looks great. The link works… directly to a 404 message (meaning the requested Web page was not found). Maybe this one isn’t your fault. Maybe your webmaster inadvertently forgot to tell you he or she switched servers. But even if it was the webmaster’s fault, who do you think will catch the blame? Keep checking those banner links every few days.
Weak message. The same things that make good ads make good banners. Unfortunately, the same things that make bad ads make horrible banners. If you don’t know how to write and design a clever, compelling message, hire someone who does. Nothing turns off poten­tial prospects more than a really stupid attempt at being clever, an offense usually committed with the aid of a bad pun. Remember that your ad is a representative of you, containing a smattering of your personality and ability. If it looks dopey to a viewer, guess what they’re going to think about you? It’s better to be clear than clever.
Confusing message. Your banner looks pretty, but nobody understands what the heck you’re talking about. This is the number-one mistake made by do-it-yourselfers.
Boring banners. One common mistake is that your banner doesn’t compel your recipients to respond within a certain time frame. Without a deadline, there is no immediacy to act, which means they scroll away until they forget it.
Web banners function the same way as traditional advertisements are intended to function: notifying consumers of the product or service and presenting reasons why the consumer should choose the product in question, although Web banners differ in that the results for advertisement campaigns may be monitored real-time and may be targeted to the viewer’s interests.

The evidence shows that Web banner ads are restricted by high cost and limited physical banner area. Let’s look at the Marketplace section of SearchEngineWatch.com:

Out of 10 advertisers only 3 are in the SEM services business. These companies – BruceClay, KeywordRanking and MoreVisibility – are the largest players in the industry; they have enough wherewithal to run these ads and enough resources to satisfy a large flow of traffic.

Pay per click advertising
Pay per click or PPC advertising is an arrangement in which webmasters (operators of websites), acting as publishers, display clickable links from advertisers, in exchange for a charge per click. As this industry evolved, a number of advertising networks developed which acted as middlemen between these two groups (publishers and advertisers). Each time a (believed to be) valid Web user clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays the advertising network, who in turn pays the publisher a share of this money. This revenue sharing system is seen as an incentive for click fraud.