How To Set Up and Start Operating a Home Based Business
Today’s Post was written by Joanna Vaiou regarding how to setup and start operating a home based business. I spotted the article and felt it could be very helpful for our readers. Below is what Joanna had to say.
I remember myself anticipating to having my first website ready when I first started, as if when I would have it ready, my business would become internationally known at a blink of an eye! Being Enthusiastic is essential… Another thing that is essential though, is to try to keep your feet on the ground. Becoming known on the Internet it’s a Step By Step process that you have to go through very carefully and with consistency. The more focused and consistent you are from the instant you start, the sooner you will achieve your business goals, by accordingly following your business plan!
Most of All: Do Not Panic!!
1 ) Establishing Your Target Market:
This is probably the most important thing you can do when getting your business started. You have to do your research on Who Your Customers Are before you get into any type of marketing and advertising. Especially with Pay Per Click advertising e.g., on Google Adwords you have to know what are the right keywords for your business in order to attract the right people to you, that will ask exactly for what you have to offer. Marketing to the wrong set of keywords will KILL your business, produce a substandard leads. On the other hand, marketing to the right set of keywords or the right target market will EXPLODE your business.
2 ) Find A Good Domain Name And Hosting Company:
This is the second very important part of your business foundation. Having a good domain name that relates directly to your offering business opportunity and a hosting company that has reliable customer service daily 24/7, Live Support to make sure your website – blog is up and running effectively.
3 ) Decide What Method You Will Use For Your Promotion Plan:
Squeeze Pages or Branding Site? After you have established your target market, and set up a domain and a hosting account for your website, you will need to decide what type of Marketing Site you will use. Squeeze pages and branding sites are different, but both are necessary tools for the Internet marketer. As with any other topic, you will get different opinions when it comes to Squeeze Pages or Branding sites. I use Branding Sites as I want people to get to know who I am and where I come from before starting any kind of partnership or business deal with them.
Difference between a Squeeze Page and a Branding Site:
A squeeze page is a mini sales page. Squeeze pages are also called opt in pages, splash pages, and landing pages. It’s the first and most important page that you will create and the place where your people will leave their name, email and number, in order to get more information about your business opportunity. Your squeeze page should have a smart eye-catching headline and invoke curiosity. The content of your squeeze page should address to solve a ‘problem’ or fill a ‘void’ of your customers.
Branding sites are designed to brand YOU. WordPress sites are great for branding. WordPress sites have a home page. The home page allows you to provide more information and detail than a squeeze page. As I mentioned earlier the branding site is meant to give your people information; lots of information about you, your product, and your services.
Lay out your branding site with a home page about your product and service. The “about me” tab should be all about you…your story, your background, and your truth.
It is a people’s Business and people will connect with you if they like you first and trust you later.
4 ) Pay Per Click Advertising:
Get Yourself Acquainted with the Forms and The Functionality of Pay per Click Advertising.
What is PPC?
Pay Per Click Marketing is the fastest way to drive traffic to your web site, period.
The three big pay per click sites that we recommend are as follows and they are in this order for a reason with Google being at the top.
- Google Adwords
- Yahoo Search
- MSN
Google is the main pay per click marketing search engine. There are other places that you can market on pay per click. The three major search engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN, but Google controls most of the market.
How Does Pay Per Click Work?
Pay Per Click works by you selecting keywords that are related to your business, product, or service.
1. You choose keywords or key phrases
2. You bid on those keywords or key phrases to get them seen
3. Google determines which ads to show
So how do you get your ads seen?
1. Write a great ad (great copy writing is a key factor in all marketing)
2. Bid the right amount
3. Make your ad relevant to your keywords as well as your website
Google Adwords Program has unlimited free informative tutorials on how to set up and start your PPC campaign. There you will have the choice to target your ads according to language, country, set your own preferred bids on your ads and keywords, and set specific days for your ads to run or pause them anytime you wish.
After you make your keywords research, when you will know what you are doing it won’t be that difficult to get your ads seen throughout the web. To many people rush to get their ads out on Google and do not do the proper research, or work with experienced marketers and coaches.
You can apply the strategies you use for Google to Yahoo and MSN. Google’s pay per click program is called Ad Words. There is a difference between “natural” searches – the search results that appear on the left-hand side of the search page and the “paid” search results that appear on the top and right-hand side.
5 ) Article Marketing Advertising:
Article marketing is probably one of our favorite and cost effective ways to market.
This method requires a process and time to get results and visibility. It’s a way in order for you and your business to become known on the web and consider you part of the Online Marketers Community. What happens when you do article marketing is that people pick up your articles for content on their sites, for content. It’s huge. Your content is spread around virally.
The way this works is you write an article, something of value. Be sure you check out our chapter on outsourcing on next paragraphs, because article writing is something you shouldn’t waste a lot of time on yourself if you don’t like to write, aren’t good at writing, you can outsource it to experts.
When you write and submit your articles, you are putting in your links on these articles, the articles that you produce. These are one-way back links to your site, so when people pick up your articles for content, the Google crawler picks up the links and your site goes up in ranking. That means more visibility for you, more traffic to your site and recognition.
The articles you submit should be relevant to the topic of your business. They should pertain to what you are doing and whatever business you are in. In this case your articles should pertain valuable content for your readers to go through concerning Home Business Industry Topics. These could be Internet Marketing Techniques, the advantages of running their own business from home, freedom of time, ‘How-To’ articles which are a very ‘HOT’ plate for the search engines and many more.
Make sure that your articles are around 300-500 word long. You want to be picked up as providing good content about your industry or business.
You should have a bio attached to the article. BIO is the only place that you can ‘sell’. It’s the place for you to ‘TAKE’. This is where the link to your website or splash page will be located. The bio should be about you as the author. At the body of the article you only ‘GIVE’: Content of Value. The links in your Bio should come back to your website.
Your Bio should include 2-3 sentences pertaining:
- Who you are and what you do
- Give them a reason to visit your site after reading your article
- A call to action, for them to do so.
Make room in your life to submit at least two articles per week; set aside a specific time or day to make it happen. You have lots of information you can write about in whatever industry you are in. You can do it manually, or you can purchase submission services that can have over 1000 places to submit your articles.
6 ) Video Marketing Activity (HUGE)
Run a Google search on a topic like ‘best home based business opportunities’. Most likely, in addition to articles and websites, there will be several videos that pop up in the search results. Imagine having a dynamic and powerful video that introduces your product, service, and company live with your voice on and researchers landing on your beautiful video instead of being sent to a single and ‘one of the thousands’ splash pages. Google is very attracted to videos and pick them up quickly. It will help your ranking. Video Marketing is a very powerful selling tool as well as the fastest free way to get those ads out there. Use it in order to stay ahead of the competition.
Your ultimate goal in marketing is to have your ads not only seen by as many potential customers as possible, but to be in front of as many of your targeted customers as possible.
The way you treat your Video Marketing campaign is the same with how you treat your PPC campaign and your article marketing campaign. You must focus on a specific ‘keyword-driven’ target market. At Step 1 I mentioned the importance of establishing a target market and a core group of keywords. The same keywords will be plugged into the videos when you submit them. Ultimately, everything comes up to your initial development of your target market and core keywords.
As in Article Marketing you can 1) submit your videos manually to limitless video directories for free like You Tube, Yahoo Videos, Google Videos, etc 2) Submit to as many as possible directories through Video Submitting Software that do massive distribution of your videos with a click of a button.
7 ) Press Releases Marketing Method (Get Fast and High Ranking)
Another way of effective marketing of your website is to write and submit Press Releases. The information in your press release needs to be viable, newsworthy and high value content. Inside your press release, you should have one-way links that bring readers back to your site – your branding site or your squeeze page. The difference between the articles and the Press Releases is that in PR you can place your URL link in the ‘body’ of your content, once every 100 words.
Press releases are a great SEO tool that can quickly improve your ranking. There are a lot of sites looking to gather information to build the content on their websites, so if they pick up your press release, and inside your press release you have one-way links back to your site, the search engines will know and act accordingly by rewarding you with higher ranking.
This is a method that requires some time to build a reputation. Give it some time and as long as you do this on a consistent basis, sending out once press releases per month with relevant, high value information, you’ll start seeing increased traffic to your site.
Again there is a free PR submission option and a paid one. Again it will be up to your budget flexibility.
8 ) Social Media Marketing:
Millions of people everyday are viewing, updating, or connecting with others all over the world. These sites are very easy to get set up on, as all you have to do is sign up with your information and you are ready.
As of today the big three that I use consistently for Internet marketing are Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and Ecademy.com. There are hundreds more out there and this is a great way to let people know about whom you are what you do, as well as what your product or service is all about. Social
Networking Sites are considered as the Hottest Market Place and reports have shown that people search and finally trust opportunities through viral tools, such as all these today’s Hot Marketing Trends.
You must apply the ‘90-10%’ Marketing Rule which means, that the 90% of your posts and interactions must be about you socializing, making connections, letting people know you first and only a 10% talking about your business. People don’t like to be sold. Be human and treat like you would like to be treatedJ. It’s a People’s Business.
9 ) Outsourcing Resources:
Every marketing method I mentioned so far, every tool that you are given to use can be outsourced. Evaluate the time that you can give to your business, filter the activities that are most compatible to your character and nature and outsource the rest! Web design building, hosting etc. You cannot outsource everything assuming that your budget is limited; you will have to learn how to do some of them, apply at least 2 of the previous mentioned methods for your business.
Take it Step By Step when growing your business and grow your outsourcing at a steady pace. You always have the control of all your marketing activities. You are the leader and the one that will lead you to Success!
Make sure you are on the right track and apply the knowledge you learn, every single piece of it day by day! And of course Enjoy the Ride!
King Regards,
Joanna Vaiou
I hope you got as much great information from this posting as I did.
To be long-term successful, you MUST have a marketing system for your opportunity. I love mine because it offers total training in the skills of working with people, so that you get better and better‚ and your people can plug into exactly the same system, making it far easier for you to help them.
If you are considering a career in network marketing, view my website at http://herb.mynusystem.com We want you to see what lengths we will go to help assure your success. Never forget the fact, that in Network Marketing, my success will always depend on your success. Take action and get started “Today!!” Contact me by email at hunter645@aol.com or call 734-285-6792.
To your Success.. Herb Hunter.. Coach, Builder, Mentor, and Just a Great Guy..
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Herb Great information,i have been busy taking notes,
Thanks again,
Bob