Saturday, August 9, 2008

Get The Fundamentals Right


To succeed in business on the Internet, or in the off-line world, requires an understanding of the fundamentals of business and using them to your advantage. In this article, I will outline what I consider the fundamentals of business success are.

Believe in Your Product or Service

First, you need to believe in your product or service. If you don't believe in it, you will have a great deal of difficulty selling your product or service to other people. You also need to have confidence in your ability to provide and promote your product or service. An old saying sums this up best by stating: "All things are possible to he who believes".

Aptitude for the Business

Secondly, you need to have an aptitude for the business. You will also need the motivation to acquire at the very least basic skills and experience before you start your business. If you were to set yourself up as a web designer but did not have any skills or training in this area, then you will almost certainly fail. However, if you are employed as a bookkeeper and you enjoy the job, then setting up your own bookkeeping service would be a sensible choice with a greater chance of success.

Be Responsible

Thirdly, you need to be responsible to your customers. This is achieved by only making commitments you can keep and by not engaging in misleading or dishonest advertising. If you want to build long-term success in your business, then you need to develop long-term satisfied customers. When their needs are being satisfied, customers are at their happiest.

Aim for High Quality

The next principle is that you need to have a high quality product or service. This will be your best advertisement. Inferior quality products usually generate poor customer satisfaction. A dissatisfied customer can be very dangerous for your business. Usually they tell on average about fourteen other people who will then be disinclined to buy your product or service based on the experience of that one dissatisfied person. Therefore, always aim for a top quality product or service.

Make a Profit

However, it is not enough to have a top quality product or service. You also need to have a product or service that will generate enough income to cover all your business expenses and give you a satisfactory wage. A friend of mine once said that business is only about two things: satisfying customers and making a profit. A simple statement but very true.

Sufficient Start-up Capital

You also need to have access to enough cash to set up and run your business, and enough income to meet your private expenses during the start-up phase. A major problem with many home and small businesses is that they fail to have enough money available to ensure their success. There is nothing more discouraging than having a great idea, getting it started on a shoestring, not being able to expand due to cash shortages and seeing a competitor come along and steal your market.

Start Small

Another fundamental principle of home business success is that you start small. This will enable you to minimize your overheads until you are confident of your success in the marketplace. For many of you, this would mean starting part-time while retaining your full-time income source. When you can, expand your business into a full-time venture. This is a great way of minimizing the risk of failure.

Be Well Organized

Successful businesses are well organized. They have a system for keeping track of expenditure and earnings. This level of organization in your business will help to ensure that you are providing your customers or clients with a top quality product or service. It will also ensure that you have enough information available to maximize your profitability and to satisfy your legal requirements for record keeping.

Be Prepared

Preparation is another key ingredient in your business success. This preparation will include being aware of the regulations and laws affecting small and home business. Armed with this knowledge, you should not have any nasty surprises from unintentional violations of the law.

Have a Business Plan

Finally, successful businesses have developed a comprehensive business plan. This is their road map to success. It tells them where they are going and how they are going to get there. There are a number of good resources about business planning on the Internet. Here are some:

http://www.bplans.com
http://www.businesstown.com/planning/creating.asp
http://www.bizplanit.com/

Conclusion

It has been said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. The same can be said about business success. Without having the fundamentals in place, a great business idea will usually fail. Set yourself up for success by considering each of the points raised in this article.
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Eugene Rivera is an internet marketing protégé. He is the webmaster of Secrets of Online Success. Learn about all the money making techniques to achieve success on the Internet. Click on our webpage at http://www.secretsofonlinesuccess.info
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Thursday, August 7, 2008

Is It Possible To Earn A Fulltime Income Online?


Most of us have seen numerous adverts promoting programs that will earn us yachts and mansions for only a few dollars investment. Too good to be true? Unfortunately yes. Most of the time you will waste time and money with these programs. So is there a way to make a full time income from only working online a few hours per day?

The short answer is yes but you need to put in a lot more time than a few hours per day to start with. Over the past 8 months I have worked up to 6 hours per day building an income to eventually replace the one in my job. It takes dedication and focus and slowly but surely your income will grow to the point that you can cut back your hours and get some quality time with your family.

The first thing you need to do is to sit down and have a long hard think about what you want from life. I would bet that most of you will at first think about the fast cars and mansions and the celebrity lifestyles that are depicted in many aspirational adverts. However think harder, these are things you would like to have not what you want from life. If after you’ve thought deeply you decide that you want to see your family grow up, you want to be able to make it to your children’s school concert and not have to work late on that important project. If you decide that you want to be able to take your wife for a romantic lunch before you collect the kids from school then you have the correct frame of mind to start making an income for yourself. If you don’t have a family and you decide you want to be self reliant and not a wage slave then you are on the way. Be realistic and you won’t be disappointed.

Now you know what you want and you know it’s realistic it’s time to get yourself a strategy. I like to think of my income building strategy in terms of building a house, before you put up the walls and roof, the part of the house you can see and admire you need to put in the foundations. The foundation of your income has to be a steady source of reliable income that you can build on. For this I built a number of content websites and monetized them by adding Adverts and Adsense feeds. I write articles and submit them to directories. I do everything I can to get the sites into the search engines and get traffic to them. Once the visitors started coming and I was getting a steady income then it’s time to branch out and work on the 4 walls of our strategy.

The second part of the strategy involves taking some profit from the site building and investing it in well researched programs that have a long history of paying out. You need to do your research and due diligence here and spread the risk among a number of programs if you have any doubts about a program walk away. Now you have your foundation and 4 walls in place it’s time to top it all off with the roof.

The Roof like in your house is the top level of our strategy, this is where you take everything you have learned building your foundations and walls and apply it to your own programs, by now you will know what works, you will have developed a network of contacts through programs and forums and you are ready to develop your own programs.

The great thing about this strategy is that if you have no spare cash you can start out with very little, in fact it is possible to start out with $0.00 and turn this into a full-time income by clever use of resources. If you don’t believe that this is possible then have a look at the blog detailed in the resource box at the end of this article and watch start with $0.00 and prove there is such a thing as a free lunch.

Remember be focused and realistic and a full time income is within your grasp.
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Eugene Rivera is an internet marketing protégé. He is the webmaster of Secrets of Online Success. Learn about all the money making techniques to achieve success on the Internet. Click on our webpage at http://www.secretsofonlinesuccess.info
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Monday, August 4, 2008

5 Ways to Boost Your Traffic and Profits with Content!


Having valuable CONTENT is vitally important to your online business? In fact, content can do more to build your business and profits than just about any other resource or service available.

Here's is a list of 5 ways that content can help build your traffic, subscribers, and customers starting right now:

1. Boost your search engine ranking and daily visitor count by posting keyword rich articles and content on your web-site. For example, if your business involves offering products and services related to dating, posting dating related articles and content will attract prospective customers on a regular basis!

2. Generate a much higher rate of newsletter subscribers than you currently have, simply by offering content in the form of "special reports" or ebooks as bonuses for subscribing to your newsletter. People love free information, so give them what they want and watch your subscriptions increase!

3. Create automated cashflow by using content to formulate multi-part email training courses with related web-site or affiliate links "sprinkled" throughout. Use an autoresponder service to automate the delivery of your training course.

Training courses will also serve as excellent bonus offers for your prospective newsletter subscribers.

4. One of the most important keys to a successful online business is not just having a mailing list or newsletter. It's about building a trusting relationship with your subscribers. This is called "cultivating" your list.

By sending informative articles and other valuable information(content) to your list on a regular basis you will establish yourself as an expert in your niche, as well as gain the trust of your subscribers. As a result, your subscribers will be more apt to take advantage of your paid product and service offers. Make sure that you NEVER take advantage of the relationship you develop with your list by offering products or services of poor quality just to make a quick buck, you will regret it.

If there is one constant in Internet marketing, it's that a cultivated mailing list of subscribers is as good as money in the bank. Don't ever forget that.

5. Another excellent way to generate no cost traffic is by submitting articles to article directories and newsletter publishers with your "resource box" attached. A resource box is nothing more than a short 3-6 line "bio" about you and your web site including a link to your site or instructions on how to subscribe to your newsletter. The important thing to remember here is that you want the link in your resource box to contain your most important keyword or words.

When submitting your article for reprint purposes, make sure to specify that each article is to be reprinted with your resource box attached.

Even one article can go a long way towards generating no cost traffic and visitors. Just imagine your article being sent out to a newsletter subscriber base of 100,000 individuals - many of whom will be reading the included resource box and clicking on your link to learn more about what you have to offer.

Well there you have 5 sure ways to build your online business with the help of articles and content.

With the declining effectiveness of many of the online advertising methods that we relied on in the past, good content is becoming the ultimate KEY to generating one way links, traffic, subscribers, and customers!
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Eugene Rivera is an internet marketing protégé. He is the webmaster of Secrets of Online Success. Learn about all the money making techniques to achieve success on the Internet. Click on our webpage at http://www.secretsofonlinesuccess.info
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