Many Americans work outside of the home, but you may not be most Americans. If you work from home, time management may be a problem. Yes, working from home has its benefits and there are many, but distractions are easy to come by. So, how do you avoid distractions and increase your earning potential when working from home?
1 – Work the Same Hours Everyday
Whether you work from home part-time or full-time, having a set work schedule is advised. When your hours vary, you may find it harder to work. It is also advised that you work during the hours you perform the best. In fact, that is one of the many freedoms of working from home; you can typically set your own hours.
Do you perform better working during the day or at night? To improve your productivity, choose work hours that work best for you.
2 – Work Around Your Schedule
If you work full-time, you may spend all day or all night in front of the computer. This may not give you much flexibility. However, if you work part-time from home as an internet marketer, you have the freedom to set your own hours, as there are less hours to dictate.
When choosing which hours to work, it is important to look at your daily activities. Do you have a morning exercise routine? Or do you take your children to school each day? Instead of working for two hours, stopping, and starting again, arrange your schedule so that you can work continuously. This will result in less distractions, more efficient work, and better productivity.
3 – Do Not Answer the Phone
A problem with working from home is that it is a concept that not everyone understands. For example, you may have friends or family who actually assume you are home watching television all day. Yes, you aren’t, but these individuals often do not know better. This may result in multiple phone calls to your home during work hours.
So, what do you do? Avoid answering the phone. If you are a parent, this may be difficult. For that reason, rely on the use of caller identification and an answering machine. This allows you to be alerted in the event of an emergency. As for why you should avoid answering the phone, you would not talk on the phone all day when working outside of the home, so don’t do it when working inside.
4 – Avoid Distractions
Before you can successfully avoid distractions, you need to determine what distracts you. Unfortunately, distractions are common when working from home. While working at your computer, you may glance over to a sink full of dirty dishes. Instead of stopping what you are doing, create a schedule. Set aside a daily block of time, such as one or two hours to complete housework.
In keeping with distractions, you will find the internet to be a huge one. Since you work from your computer, it is easy to go from using the internet as a research tool to communication with friends. If your weakness is checking your email multiple times a day, reading the news, or visiting online message boards to socialize, stay away from these websites. As an extreme measure, temporally block them from your computer.
5 – Remember Your Ability to Work Depends on Your Income
If you work from home as an internet marketer, the time and energy you put into work will depend on your income. This is one of the benefits and pitfalls to working from home. The more work you complete, the more income you will generate. However, if you find yourself easily distracted, not only will you fall behind, but you may lose money.
Simply remembering that time is money can serve as a much-needed source of motivation.
In short, working from home is beneficial, but it is not an easy task. To increase your income level, improve your time management skills. This is easy to do with simple tools, such as an alarm clock, schedule or to-do-list.
Archive | Blog
5 Reasons to Create an Internet Marketing Schedule
Do you operate a website or blog that generates income through the sale of a product, service, or affiliate links? If so, you not only need to be a webmaster, but an online marketer.
As a website owner who uses a website to generate income, internet marketing is important to your success. For that reason, you need to implement it. If this is a new step for you, you may be looking for guidance. The first step is to familiarize yourself with popular internet marketing techniques. You can easily do this online or by visiting internet marketing forums. Once you know how to market your website or blog, you start to implement the techniques you learned. Unfortunately, this is where many new marketers make costly mistakes.
To ensure you get the most out of your newfound internet marketing knowledge, you need to create a schedule. When properly complied and used, a schedule will increase your productivity. Remember, the more traffic you drive to your website or blog, the more your earnings potential increases. If that isn’t enough reason to create a schedule, continue reading on for five more.
1 – It Is Easy to Make a Schedule
An internet marketing schedule is essentially a detailed to-do list. What you do is start with times. Set aside blocks of times, like in one or two hour increments. For each time slot, write a task or two. This is what you want to do. For example, do you want to submit an article to a directory or send advisements to your followers on Twitter? If so, add to your schedule.
2 – You Have Many Options
Not only is making an internet marketing schedule easy, but you have many options. You can compose a schedule by hand, in Microsoft Word, or by spreadsheet. You also have the option of creating daily, weekly, or monthly schedules.
3 – A Schedule is a Guide
When you are familiar with internet marketing tactics, it is easy to advertise online. Unfortunately, many run into problems with distractions. It is easy to go from using the internet to research to reading the news or the latest celebrity gossip. To prevent this from happening, use your schedule as a guide. You want to avoid distractions, but if an interruption happens, don’t spend time trying to remember what you were doing or were about to do, just consult your schedule and get back to work.
4 – It Serves as a Source of Motivation
As previously stated, a schedule is essentially a to-do list with times attached. These times are important as they add pressure and serve as motivation. When you track your time with a clock or beeping alarm clock, you know when time is about to expire or has. When most know they only have X amount of time to complete a task, they tend to put forth more effort and increase their productivity.
5 – You Can Extend Your Reach
In terms of internet marketing, there are hundreds of successful tactics. You cannot implement them all in one day, but get the process started. When doing so, don’t place all your attention on one marketing tactic. Unfortunately, if you do not have a set guide to follow, you may make this mistake. The best way to market a website, product, or service is to spread your reach.
“Do-It-Yourself” Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Three Easy Steps
Ranking high in Google’s search results can have a phenomenal impact on the success of your business.
You can either engage the expertise of a Search Engine Optimization company, or if you have the time, there are some changes you can make to your website yourself.
Step 1: Keyword Research
What keywords do you think your customers would type in to search for your products or services? A keyword can be one word (e.g., “optimization”), but multiple keywords or keyword phrases are usually preferred, because they are more specific and more likely to be what your customers are looking for.
Write down as many as you can think of. Brainstorm with your team. Think of alternative words. Consider geographical phrases if they are important to your customer (e.g., “house cleaning Hornsby”). Also, get some ideas from your competitors’ websites. Try to make a list of 20-30 keyword phrases.
Choose the two keyword phrases you think would be searched for the most. But also remember, the more competition there is for a keyword, the harder it is to achieve top rankings. If you want to rank high in Google for the keyword “insurance”, you have a very long journey ahead. So, try your best to select two keyword phrases that are the most relevant to your business but that are not vague nor competitive. It’s a good idea to have 2 or 3 words in each phrase (e.g., “wedding catering services”)
Once you’ve selected your two best keyword phrases the next step shows you how to make some improvements to your home page.
Step 2: Web Copy
Web copy refers to all the words or text on your website. Because content is king in the world of search engines, your keyword phrases need to be placed strategically on your webpage to convince Google that your content is highly relevant to those keywords. The more prominent they are, the better. (Keep in mind that as important as search engines are, customers come first, so make sure your copy also reads well.)
Here’s how you can increase each keyword’s prominence:
• Place your keywords in headings, preferably at the beginning of the heading.
• Include keywords towards the top of the page.
• Bold or italicize keywords where appropriate.
• Instead of having a link to another page that says, “Click here to read more “, reword it to include your keywords.
An important tip is to also include these keywords in your HTML “title tag”. Use your content management system to make these changes yourself, or perhaps ask your web developer to do it if you’re unsure how.
Once you have fine-tuned your home page, consider adding new content, such as detailed descriptions of what you offer, FAQs and informative articles about your products and services. (If you don’t want to write these yourself, they can be located for free on the internet – do a search for “articles directory”).
It’s also good to bear in mind that search engines can only read text, not pictures. Often web developers embed words in images to look better for website visitors or use Flash for animation, but this is a major impediment to search engines.
Step 3: Linking
Each link from another website to your website (not from your website) is considered by search engines as a vote of popularity for your business and will improve your rankings.
But it is the quality, not quantity, of the links that is crucial. The other websites should be relevant to your industry, and preferably highly regarded themselves. Ten quality links count far more than 500 links from arbitrary websites. In the same way your personal business network can have a significant impact on the success of your business, so too the online network you build on the internet.
Brainstorm all the relevant websites that could link to you, such as non-competing companies, and industry bodies and organizations. Write a friendly email to each describing the benefit their visitors would get in knowing about your business and request them to create a link to your website. Most people will not respond first time round, so a follow-up phone call is usually required.
How do I monitor my results?
Monitor your rankings in Google over the next few months by typing your chosen keywords into the search box and recording your ranking. Also look at your hosting reports to understand what search terms your visitors are using to find your website.
The above process can also be repeated for each page of your website. Remember to keep updating your content, and continually increase the number of links to your website.
Simple, straight forward and honest
One of many reviews for Plug-In Profit Site
What do I like about the Plug-In Profit Site program: Simple, straight forward and honest. Not once did I feel pressured to buy something.
No promises of unimaginable wealth was given, only proof of actual success (It showed current figures which I have not seen on other programs or systems.) The help desk actually works! Thanks Pat! You are awesome!
But the thing I like the most so far is Stone Evans. One can see this is a person that has been around the block a few times. He understands the importance of trust and knows the fears of someone that is new to this type of business. I’m on day one and was never this excited about a project until now!
Stone made a very good suggestion that I post my 30 Days to Success progress on my site as well, I’m going to do just that. Keep track as they say.
Stone and Pat, thanks for everything up to date!
Drikus Rensburg
Facebook: An Effective Tool to Increase Your Sales
Today, the internet is one of the most popular places for businesses to advertise in. Every website you visit, you will see that there will be advertising everywhere. This is called internet marketing.
If you have a business of your own and you want to effectively market your products or services, you will see that the internet will be one huge bulletin board that you can advertise in. Here, you will be able to virtually advertise anything and it is open for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
With hundreds of millions of people visiting the internet on a daily basis from all over the world, you can be sure that advertising here will definitely increase your sales.
One great website that you may want to concentrate your online advertising campaign on is Facebook. Today, this social networking website is now considered to be one of the largest social networking websites existing. Here, you will see that over 62 million people are now active members and are still continually increasing.
With figures like this, you know that it will provide you with a very big opportunity to increase your sales and your profit. In fact, it is so huge that large companies or corporations are now marketing on Facebook.
Basically, Facebook is a social networking website. Once you join, you will be able to find your friends who are also a member and add them to your list. This will create a small group of your friends and it will enable you to view their profiles and know more about them and vice versa. You can even send and receive messages as well as comments.
Also, you will be able to post on bulletins that your friends will be able read.
These are the things that you can do with Facebook. It is basically the fastest growing social networking websites today. Because of this, a lot of people have started marketing on Facebook. The great thing about Facebook marketing is that it provides a free and easy way to promote products and services. With the included tools in Facebook, you will be able to take advantage of it, such as the Stumble Upon and Digg buttons to promote your website or your products and services.
This is a great way to generate targeted traffic to your website and it will enable you to increase the potential in selling your products and services as well as increase the volume of sales.
Because Facebook is available for people from all over the world, your business will be able to reach out to more people if you advertise on Facebook.
In today’s ever competitive business world, you know that you need to use every tool available in order to get ahead of your competitors. So, the next time you are thinking about marketing your business online, you might want to try marketing in Facebook. Here, you will be able to reach out to more people and it is also easy to do so and the best thing about it is that it’s free.
With Facebook, you will definitely be able to efficiently market your business. Marketing in Facebook is free, easy, and fun.
These are the things that you need to remember whenever you want to try marketing online. Try joining Facebook and you will see the potential on letting it help your business grow.
Big And Small Internet Marketing Solutions
Big businesses and small businesses alike are looking for an internet marketing solution to bring them the best targeted traffic that can be most easily converted into sales. With all of the options out there for marketing your business, it’s hard sometimes to see the best methods for getting traffic and enticing that traffic to buy your product or service. But savvy marketers have a great internet marketing solution to keep consumers thinking about your company in a good way, and make it much more likely that someone will buy from you.
The best internet marketing solution for almost every type of business is to start at least one opt-in mailing list. Years ago, direct marketers purchased mailing lists from companies that gathered the information. These lists were just names and addresses of people culled from a variety of sources. Business owners would then send a piece of mail to each person on the list in the hopes that some would want the product or service offered enough pay for it. Spam is a similar type of thing, only done through email. People send out the same message to hundreds or thousands of people, just hoping a few will bite.
This is a highly inefficient and undesirable way to email people about your business. Not only can it get your account shut down, it’s not like to do anything but alienate the people you’re trying to sell to. But if you had a list of people who were already interested in your product or service and all of those people said it was perfectly okay to send them emails that advertise your company, wouldn’t that be an internet marketing solution that would solve some problems?
If you set up your own email list that people have to agree to join, then you have that targeted list of people who have given you permission to contact them. You can email them as rarely or as often as you want (you don’t want to hound people, but you don’t want them to forget you, either). And you can advertise whatever you want in these emails, without worry of being tagged for spamming people, since they all agreed to get emails from you when they signed up for the mailing list.
An opt-in mailing list is an internet marketing solution that prevents you from having to do the scattershot mailing list marketing of the pre-Internet marketing era. The trick is to get people to sign up for your list. Unless they’ve already purchased from you and are considering purchasing from you again, you’re not likely to attract many people by asking them to join a list so you can send them ads.
Offer your visitors something for signing up for your list. It can be a discount on something you offer, or better yet, give them good information, they kind they were looking for when they searched and found your site. The age-old lure of the freebie is the internet marketing solution for building a mailing list.
How To Grab Your Readers Attention With Your Subject
The race for supremacy in the internet-based businesses has been really heating up and many sites have been put up to help others to get ahead for a small fee. But there are also ways in which you don’t have to pay so much to make yourself a good list of loyal followers. Having a satisfied web traffic and visitors allows you to put up a foundation wherein you can build an opt-in list and make it grow from there.
An opt-in list allows you to provide newsletters to your subscribers with their consent. When people sign up, they know that they will be receiving updates and news from your site and the industry you represent via an e-mail. But that doesn’t mean that all of those who subscribe read them at all. Many lists have been built due to an attachment with free software or for a promotional discount and such. Some are not really interested in receiving e-mails from companies and just treat them as waste of cyberspace and delete or trash them without so much as opening the e-mail and scanning them.
You can change all that. While forwarding an email message is relatively after producing your newsletter. Getting people to open them is not as easy. You don’t want to waste all the time and effort used in making the newsletters, you want people to read them and have their interests piqued. Interested enough to go to your website and look around and most especially purchased and acquire your products or services.
One of the numerous ways you can tempt or persuade your subscriber is by providing a well thought out and well written subject. The subject of an email is what is often referred to when a person or a recipient of an email decides whether he or she wants to open or read an e-mail. The subject could easily be regarded as one of the most important aspects of your promotional e-mail.
Your subject must be short and concise. They should provide a summary for the content of the e-mail so that the recipient will have basic knowledge of the content. This is really vital in grabbing the attention of your readers and subscribers. You want your subject to instantly grab the attention of your subscriber and get them to be intrigued to open up your mail. Remember, it is not necessarily true that a subscriber opens up subscribed mails.
A good subject must always be tickling the curiosity of your recipient. It must literally force the recipient to open the mail. A certain emotion must be ignited and get them to open the mail. It is essential to use specific words to get the reaction you need. Keep in mind that the recipient or subscribers spends only a few seconds looking over each subject of the e-mails he receives. You must grab your reader’s attention right away.
There are many forms you can use for your subject. You can provide a subject that says your e-mail contains content that teaches them tips and methods on certain topics. An example of this is using keywords and keyword phrases such as, “How to” , “tips”, “Guides to”, Methods in and others like that.
You can also put your subject in a question form. These may include questions like, “Are you sick and tired of your job?” Or “Is your boss always on your case?” Try to stay on the topic that pertains to your site so that you’ll know that your subscribers have signed up because they are interested in that topic. This form of subject is very effective because they reach out to your recipient’s emotions. When they have read the question on your subject, their mind starts answering the question already.
You can also use a subject that commands your reader. Statements such as “Act now and get this once in a lifetime opportunity”, or “Double, triple and even quadruple what you are earning in one year”. This type of subject deals with the benefits your company provides with your product and services.
You may also use breaking news as your subject to intrigue your subscriber. For example, if you deal with car engine parts you can write in your subject, “Announcing the new engine that uses no gasoline, it runs on water”. This creates curiosity with the reader and will lead them to open the mail and read on.
Becoming Wealthy through the Home-Based Business Opportunity
Thanks to the Internet, more people than ever before are discovering that they can launch their own home-based business. Essentially, all you need is a computer, an Internet connection, and the right home-based business opportunity. The question then becomes, how to you select the best home based business opportunity? Here are four steps you can take to help you decide which opportunity is right for you.
Determine Your Goals
Before committing to an income opportunity at home, you first need to determine your goals. Are you interested in supplementing your income from your current job? Do you wish to stay at home with your children, but bring in a second income? Are you retired and want to supplement your pension or social security? Or are you tired of the nine-to-five grind and want to make a full time income by working only part time? Perhaps you have a specific financial goal in mind, such as a vacation or college fund, or maybe you want to harness the power of the Internet and become genuinely wealthy. Determining your financial goals will help you find the best home based business opportunity.
Can You Sell?
Many times, a home-based business opportunity requires you to sell products. Are you a salesperson at heart, or does the thought of calling people and selling products make you cringe? If you’re a born salesperson, there are any number of opportunities that allow you to excel. However, if you’re not a natural salesperson, there’s no reason to go outside your comfort zone. Even if you try, you probably won’t succeed.
Instead, find a home-based business opportunity that harnesses the power of the Internet to provide you with an automated, hands-off lead generation and sales system. Typically, these kinds of opportunities offer products – such as software or information products – that essentially sell themselves. The companies that offer these kinds of business opportunities will provide you with the tools you need to help you succeed, such as your own website, training, and marketing support.
Seek Out Flexibility
You may be in the position to work predetermined hours from home, but the majority of people who seek an income opportunity at home need flexibility. Perhaps you have school-age children, or maybe you are a night owl and want to work from 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. The best home based business opportunity enables you to work the hours that are convenient to you and that allows you to access the vital information you need 24-7-365.
The Right Compensation Plan
There are almost as many compensation plans as there are home-based business opportunities. When you’re reviewing opportunities, make sure to compare apples to apples. Generally speaking, the best compensation plans give you 100% of every sale after your first two sales (which go to your immediate upline). You then receive the sales from the first two sales of each person in your downline, and their downline, and so forth to infinity. This type of compensation plan generally outperforms those that are commission-based because commission-based compensation plans typically are of greatest benefit to those at the top and leave relatively little profit for you.
When you find the best home based business opportunity, you can maximize your earning potential and truly become wealthy.
10 Time-tested, Battle-Hardened Blog Traffic Techniques
1. Blog Regularly – many of the top blogs post 10-20 times per day.
2. Create Authority Articles – instead of blogging frequently, post less often but focus on creating Authority Posts — lengthier articles that are really well put together which will attract attention from other bloggers & users of social bookmarking sites like Digg, reddit, etc.
3. Comment on Other Blogs – do not keyword spam in these, but rather use your own name and add value to the conversation.
4. Link Out Frequently to Industry Leaders – show some link love to other bloggers in your niche. In turn, they might eventually link back if you have a quality post on a topic they have not covered yet.
5. Participate in Blog Carnivals – these are a way for bloggers within a niche to get together and periodically highlight posts from one another’s blogs. You can find an index of these at BlogCarnival.com.
6. Do Guest Posts – not just for A-List bloggers, but B-List and beyond. Be sure to work up some good material first, so as to make a good first impression.
7. Article Marketing – chances are, you’re reading this via a site that syndicated this article using an article marketing script of some sort. Join a site like ArticleMarketer.com and syndicate your articles to thousands of participating sites. If distributed via the web, these sites are required to link back to you via a byline (see below).
8. Social Digging/Mixing – join sites like Digg, Mixx, Bumpzee, etc. and encourage your users and/or friends to submit your stories.
9. Social Bookmarking – join del.icio.us, Furl, Wink, Backflip, etc. and submit your popular articles to these sites to seed them into the community.
10. Use Great Headlines – okay, which sounds better “Some Ways to Get Readers”, or “10 Time-tested, Battle-Hardened Blog Traffic Techniques”. Many readers are particularly fond of “Top X” lists, or “How To …” posts.
Age Old Question Do You Need To Have Your Own Product
Whether or not you need to have your own product to become a successful affiliate marketer is a question that has been asked and answered every few minutes since affiliate marketing came on the scene. The reason it is asked so often is because everybody has a different answer. There are those who say you absolutely MUST have your own product to get started and to succeed in affiliate marketing and then there are those who say you don’t need a product when you start or ever to be successful. So, which is it? Yes? No?
The fact of the matter is that everybody is right. Having your own product is great but it isn’t absolutely necessary. Those who have their own product can build a website around that product and add affiliate links to it. Those who don’t have their own products can still create a great website and be an affiliate marketer. Producers of products love affiliate marketers and products are not the least bit hard to find.
The thing that both those who do and those who don’t have their own product have in common is that they both must be passionate about the products they sell. You will never be successful in selling something that you aren’t interested in yourself. It takes drive and ambition to succeed at any endeavor and affiliate marketing isn’t any different. You must be passionate about a product or an idea in order to keep your drive and ambition alive and well for the long haul.
Whether you are marketing your own product or a product produced by others your success is directly related to how effective your marketing techniques are, how focused you are, how well you manage your time, and how much you believe in the product.
