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Should You Work From Home?

One of the big mistakes that people make when they’re considering starting a home based business is they fail to consider what it actually takes to be successful working from home.

At first it’d surprise me when people would tell me they could never do what I do simply because they wouldn’t be able to make themselves get up in the morning. They’d sleep in and do nothing all day.

While a few online business owners are rather infamous for sleeping until noon, they’re also the ones you’re likely to find in their office working on a project at 3 am.

So today I want help you understand what it really takes to start a home based business and make it successful.

Are you a self starter?

When you have your own business, it’s very different than working for someone else. If you show up late, there’s nobody to reprimand you. It’s on you to be accountable to yourself.

Can you get things done if there is nobody watching over you to make sure it gets done? If you’re not able to motivate yourself and to set your own deadlines for yourself then you may want to rethink this whole “starting a home based business” thing in the first place.”

4 Hour work week?

When Timothy Ferris released 4 Hour Work Week, he started a phenomenon. The idea of only working four hours a week really appealed to a lot of people. And yes, it is possible.

However, it’s not the normal case. First of all, most people that I know who have successful home based businesses actually like what they do. You know the old adage, “do what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life.” For many home based business owners they really do like what they do and want to work more than that.

The reality is that for most people, four hours a week isn’t enough. I know that in the past, I’ve had days where 14 hours a day isn’t enough. I don’t want to discourage you, but I do want you to get an idea of what it’s really like sometimes. Are you willing to do what it takes to succeed?

Dealing with distraction

You’re going to need an area where you can focus and get work done. I remember when I helped my mother get started with her home based business, her productivity was terrible. We eventually figured out that she was allowing herself to get distracted by people all the time. People would stop over to visit because they knew she’d be home. People would call her up to chat, again, because they knew she was around.

Eventually, we found that for her, the best plan was for her to head to the library to get work done. She was able to focus without being bothered.

Make sure that your kids and spouse know that when you’re working they can’t bother you unless it’s an emergency. If you fail to do that, you’re setting yourself up for a very frustrating experience of working from home.

Are you willing to learn?

The last thing I want to mention is the need to be willing to learn. I’ve seen people who have spent $60,000 on a college education become unwilling to spend a few hundred dollars on a course that will teach them what they need to know to be successful in their business.

One way or another, you are going to pay for your education. It’s either going to be through experience and the school of hard knocks or you can take the easier route and pay others for their specialized knowledge. It’s cheaper and less stressful to take the paid route, but the choice is ultimately up to you, but just remember this a lot you don’t know and you need to be willing to learn.

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Writing Product Reviews

Product review & rating has become a popular feature that most of the successful e-commerce merchants have applied on their product details page. Main advantage of this feature is: it assures the visitors and customers that this product is not just another banal e-commerce product. People are actually talking about it (both positive and negative) and their thinking is listed here!

People always leave for your competitors when your product details page can’t satisfy them by assuring them. Your product details page is the most important part of the site as this is the place when your customers decide whether to add the product to the cart or to abandon it. Hence, every effort should be taken to assure the customers that the products you are offering are indeed offers good bargain and value for price.

One of the strongest features in your product details page is the option to let the customers express their opinion and experience about the product. A simple one line comment added by a happy customer can assure lots of other visiting customers about purchasing the product.

Following are 5 tips for making your product details page more efficient by encouraging customers and visitors to write reviews for your products:

Tips 1 – Product Details page Design:

Your product details page design should get special emphasize hence people always love to visit the products details pages that are visually attractive and neatly presented. The product details page should arrange the product images, description, prices and attribute selection options etc. very neatly and in a way so that customers can find information easily. If your product details page design and arrangement is vivid and attractive, people would love to write something about it. Adding Image zooming, image video and multiple images illustrates the product better and thus gives customers a good insight about the product. If a visitor finds a eye-catchy product details page, it’s more likely that s/he would like to add some words there.

Tips 2 – Don’t make the process complicated:

Keep the Review & Rating feature simple. A complicated process would simply forbid visitors and customers from adding the reviews. If you want the rating feature to be present along with the review option, offer a visual 5 star rating which can be rated using the mouse click. Offer the negative rating options that would give a bold impression to the visitors that they are free to rate it the way they feel. For the Review make the email fields optional as people often don’t want their emails to be visible publicly. Offer an option whether to show or hide the email addresses from the published reviews. One issue you should be particularly careful about is the CAPTCHA. Easy CAPTCHA can easily be broken by the spammers and hard CAPTCHA irritates the real reviewers. Choose one which is difficult to break by the Spamming softwares yet easy for the human users to read.

Tips 3 – Moderate the Reviews and rating:

Your e-commerce platform should help you administering the review and rating casted by the visitors or customers. You should be able to publish/un-publish the reviews,(even manipulate if you want), control the visibility, control the number of reviews per page, reply back to a reviewer and other conventional review & rating moderation features. If you value what your customers are saying about your products, you should regularly moderate the reviews. Visitors feel frustrated they find that their reviews are never getting published in your website. Send them thank you emails for the reviews and visiting your website and as reply to the review, write something that would not only impress the reviewers but also other visitors.

Tips 4 – Keep the ‘Negative Reviews’ as well:

If your product details page is full of reviews with flattering and praising words & all 5 stars, that would possibly make other visitors doubtful about authenticity of those reviews. If customers are criticizing the products, it’s your best chance to defend the reason and let others know it. Take the chance to confront the negative reviews with satisfying answers and place them among the other reviews.

Tips 5 – Reviewing Competition:

What about announcing a little gift, free coupon or discount for the top rated reviewers? Yes, that would definitely encourage visitors and customers explore your products and write something about them. A $5 coupon code, 5% discount or free gift wrapping would inspire lot more visitors and customers to write some lines for your products.

Present your products more visually and in richly designed format, offer some benefits for writing reviews, make the process easy and moderate regularly to get more reviews.

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Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has become the most cost-efficient and accessible way of making money online. The affiliate marketer promotes one or more products of a merchandiser of his own choice based on average payment or commission on sale, promotional material and compensation plan.

Being an affiliate marketer has its own benefits and joys. The affiliates can place an ad or link back to merchant site which customer’s clicks and make a purchase so the affiliate earns the commission on sale. There are thousands of affiliate programs which are free to join and surly there’s a product out there to be choose relevant to your niche and website. Due to its simplicity and exposure of earning, affiliate marketing is most effective business to make money online.

Although there is a downside of this simplistic money making opportunity and that is a lot of competition. To stay on top of this hurdle and to become a super affiliate, one must be equipped with just the right stuff necessary to push him forward. But still there are situations where affiliate marketer fails in making any sale and thus returns on empty handed.

How To Be A Super Affiliate In Affiliate marketing?

Becoming a super affiliate is not easy. If someone wants to become a super affiliate then the first and most foremost thing is to treat affiliate marketing as a business. However there are 5 key elements that one should have in him to stand out of the crowd and start making some serious money, these are:

1. Choosing The Perfect Niche

Success in affiliate marketing is all about finding and choosing a perfect niche. Indeed this is the most critical part of whole business. A niche is something you are passionate about or things that already sell, that have a substantial market and that have room for you to build a site. Anyhow to simplify the process there are two main tools for you to find your niche. ClickBank Marketplace and Amazon.com Research.

For ClickBank marketplace you should be looking for the products with a gravity of more than 30 and a commission ranging $20 to $35. The gravity score means that how many separate affiliates are selling the product within a certain time period.

With amazon.com your goal here is to look for products with at least 20 reviews. People who actually bother to review on product are real and it’s something like 1 in 1,000. So, if a product has 20 reviews, you can estimate that more than 20,000 of that product have been purchased.

2. Keywords Research

That’s the part where many affiliate marketers start to stumble. But there are few tools and strategies you can use to make this a whole lot easier. Try to search your keywords with “product name” and “author name” because these types of keywords hold the most value than all others.

To get started you can use basic forum research related to your niche and Google keyword tool for global monthly searches for specific keyword. You can also use some sort of keyword analysis tool like “Traffic Travis” to in depth analysis of keywords, competition, SEO and building a large number of keyword lists.

3. Digging Up The Traffic

You won’t make a cent if you don’t get some visitors looking at your website. That’s the biggest thing of all that many affiliate marketers ignore and fails. Targeting a web traffic that converts to sale depends on many factors in which PPC, SEO, Banner Ads, Blogging, Forum Posting, and Article Writing are on top of all. By knowing the exact method and good preparation certainly leads to success in affiliate marketing.

4. Landing Pages And Conversions

The key here is to get as high of a conversion rate as possible, the more people you can convince to buy your product when they hit your landing page the more your chances of making big commissions. There are many types of landing pages; you can have a squeeze page to get email addresses, a product review page, and a product authority site. No matter what kind of landing page you choose always use clickable images, links, relevancy to your content and flying popovers to get more exposure of your landing page.

5. Email Marketing

The most basic and important key is email marketing and list building, when it comes to making money with affiliate marketing. There is nothing more powerful than having someone’s email address and being able to contact them directly and ask them to check out an affiliate offer and converting that contact into sale. Popular email lists operating services are AWeber, Mail chimp and Get Response.

Affiliate marketing is lucrative business. You can go from zero to 10k per month by following the plan you injected. Learning new tips, techniques and desire to adapt new things can be very helpful in becoming a super affiliate and making money within a few days.

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Understanding Affiliate Marketing

How come some Internet marketers live the life of rockstars and others seem to fail? As a successful affiliate marketer you need to be an expert in SEO, PPC, CPA analytics, traffic, conversions and have an understanding of what the best products are to sell on the web. Most people that are new to Internet marketing believe that they can just get a blog find a niche and start marketing. Since the Google Panda update the good old days of easy ranking and traffic just don’t exist like they used to. What does work is persistence, commitment and leverage.

Leverage Is Key To Success In Affiliate Marketing

Any affiliate marketer worth their weight in gold will have a team of people behind them. Sure it may seem like the affiliate is a one person show but behind the scenes they will have an outsourced designer, coder, SEO, copywriters, syndicators and a paid traffic expert. Some affiliates may dabble in all of these subjects but affiliates that are producers will outsource so they can focus on product creation, JV and marketing. Your most seasoned affiliate marketers are masters at building offline relationships and construction joint venture arrangements. It is one thing to create web traffic it is another to borrow traffic or to market to another marketers email list.

For those of you looking to become affiliate marketers and you know nothing about it the key is to get started some place. As an affiliate marketers you can sell products from Amazon or information products. There are people who get involved in CPA networks (stands for cost per acquisition) and in those you can market anything from how to information, education, insurance enrollment, motivation courses, credit cards or lead generation. Affiliate marketers can earn commissions for every sale or lead that they generate and commissions vary from 10% to 60% depending on what the product is.

How Do You Get Started As An Affiliate Marketer?

For many starting out as an affiliate marketer starts with the understanding of keyword research and search intent on search engines like Google. Using keyword research tools like the Google External tool is a good place to start. You will want to target something that has acceptable levels of competition because if it is too competitive you will never rank. You will need a blog preferably on a wordpress platform and if you are generating leads a autoresponder. To test your keywords you can do some small PPC campaigns on Google and see if your keywords convert. The goal of every affiliate marketer is to understand which keywords are your money keywords verses the ones that don’t convert. Once you understand your keywords that are highly converting then you can leverage your SEO efforts with outsourcing to invest in your organic campaign.

The fastest way to get traffic is to borrow it. Depending on what you are selling it may be possible for you to market to other affiliate marketers. If you are dealing in information products creating a joint venture with an established affiliate marketer could make a lot of sense since they may already be sitting on a large list. So if you are a master affiliate or have your own information product you can negotiate a shared commission with another marketer and they will market your products to their people. This is commonly done with information products via Webinars and it is a very successful model. Most affiliate starting out will not be in this position so you might consider leveraging video marketing, podcasting, article marketing, blogging and paid traffic sources. It is important that as your Internet marketing business develops that you attend industry conferences and events so that you can build those valuable joint venture relationships.

Are There Any Short Cuts In Marketing?

Most everything in Internet marketing takes time or money so I don’t see a short cut to becoming an affiliate marketer rockstar. It takes years of dedication for most affiliate marketers as they have to gain the skills necessary and or you have to have the resources to be able to hire the experts that can help you in your business. An Internet marketing business is composed of many moving parts and the learning curve can be complex. That’s not to say that it isn’t possible to have success in affiliate marketing but rather that you have a realistic expectation of your results. The leverage you create through outsourcing and key relationships will be the difference between success or failure.

What Is The Best Internet Marketing System For Newbies?

I believe that your goal in your Internet marketing business should be to have multiple streams of traffic and revenue. You should have a mix of your own products and other peoples products that you market. Your other goal should be to deepen your understanding of the mechanics of online marketing and like any smart business person find your leverage by outsourcing and removing yourself from the business as much as possible. There are some systems that can assist you in getting started in affiliate marketing where they will teach you the basics of keyword research and you can become an affiliate and market their products.

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5 Proven Ways To Earn Online

There are endless ways you can use to make money online. Some will give you great returns while others will leave you working for pennies. If you are looking to make money online, here are the top 5 proven ways that you can consider.

Webinar Trainings

One of the ways you can make a significant amount of money online is through webinar training. A webinar is an online event held in real time. The people present are able to interact with each other and with the presenters by sending and receiving messages in real time.

If you are an expert in a certain field, you can use webinars to train people who are interested in what you offer. To be successful in webinar training, it is important that you have a recognized online presence in your niche or area or expertise.

Start an Online Course

Another way to make money online is by starting your own online course. Courses present a good source of passive income. When you create a course, you can sell it for many years to come with little to no updates depending on the topic.

It is easy to start a course and you can price it the way you want. According to Teachable.com, their instructors make upwards of $5,200 per month and most start making money immediately after launching their courses.

People are wired to seek education and skills, therefore, if you have a good course that really delivers value, it becomes easy to build a seven figure business with it.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the act of selling products owned by others for a commission. You can use affiliate networks such as ClickBank and others or look for other online businesses and companies that have their own affiliate offers.

You can easily make money with affiliate marketing if you have a blog with a good following. You can sell products or services that would interest your blog followers and make passive income without much effort.

Drop Shipping

With drop-shipping, you sell products through your site to people who are interested without having to deal with inventory or delivery of the same. It is also a great way to make money online without a lot of investment upfront.

Become a Freelancer

Finally, you can become a freelancer and engage in lucrative ventures such as content marketing, digital marketing and advertising, web analytics, web design, graphic design and others. All of these are freelancing careers that are scalable and able to bring in a decent amount of income. Many people have built million dollar online business offering such services.

Other good ways to make money online include starting a blog, becoming an online tutor, offering virtual assistant services and working with online business like Uber, Lyft and Amazon to offer driver and delivery services.

If you are looking to make money online, the time to start is now. If you are lucky, you might make money immediately; but for most ventures, you will need time to gain traction and start making a decent income.

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3 Ways to Make Money Online

3 Long Term Strategies For Income

If you want to earn money online very fast, I recommend you to read this article as it has great facts about different ways of making money with the Internet.

Digging in to the past, you will discover that in present all kind of jobs are paid better, but you should not forget that expenses for living and current needs also increased. This can be a serious problem in case of emergency, because some people could not save money anymore. So, a great way to avoid such situations is to prepare yourself for earning online. This resource of earning is the result of the growth use of the Internet all over the world. Below you can find some great ideas about making money online with no investment.

Blogging For Financial Gain

Recently, blogging evolved into the best and brightest financial gain solution. Your earning depends on the characteristics of the content. Blogging also means to write about what you want even if the others like what you write or not. If you are professional in blogging, you can earn money writing appealing blog articles about your own experience and feelings, as people will always search fresh and interesting content.

Online Stock Trading

At the present, broking companies offer online trading to their clients. Before you choose to earn money with this method, you must learn and understand the information about trading and you should do a stock market research. You can buy or sell stocks with just a click and you can credit or debit your shares when you consider. You need to register with a user name and a password and you can start making money online.

Writing Online Reviews

Writing reviews about products for certain companies is also an online earning money form without investment. For this type of job, you should write your opinion about products, to give some details about a specific product, why would you use that product and not another, produced by a company of same status. If the employer is satisfied with your job, the result is a better remuneration and other benefits.

Other easy alternatives to have some profits online are technical writing and tutoring jobs online. There are so many offers for online income from home, that you should pay attention to these offers. Try to find registered and trusted companies that can guarantee that the jobs are legal and you will be paid. I hope this information is useful and I wish you all the best in finding the right way in making money online.