Posted by Paul Hemmant on September 7, 2010 under Home Based Business | 
As the market continues in its upward momentum and more and more people spend money, branding will become even more important for those internet businesses desiring to rise above the competition. Consumers are becoming smarter than ever in the wake of the recession and tighter budgets. They do not fall for the latest fads, but perform the research needed to make educated decisions regarding their purchases. If you are not following the branding trends, you may find yourself lagging behind the market.
As consumers become “pickier” about their purchases, brand differentiation will provide even more meaning to educated buyers. What separates you from your competitors? If you are not effectively broadcasting your unique message to your audience, your numerous “copycat” competitors will take over the market.
Your audience is also expecting more from companies as they are becoming savvier shoppers. With the latest technology and the rapid forward movement of industries, you cannot afford to lag behind everyone else. Are your internet businesses meeting those expectations? Someone will and it might as well be you. Your audience is looking for authenticity. This will serve to be more important than the product itself. Unless advertisements are truly heartfelt, they will not move the people as much as they once did. People see the sales tactics, regardless of how personal they may seem. Your values will be evident in your campaign. The best branding starts in the minds of honest entrepreneurs and is then showcased throughout the campaign.
If you are not engaging in the social media space by this point, you will fail to increase your online audience. Social networking will continue to be one of the biggest trends of the decade and those internet businesses who capitalize on the benefits will reap the rewards. Consumers talk about products and services all over the social spaces on the web. Businesses need to find the chatter concerning their brand and get involved in the communication.
If you do not stay connected to the newest trends, you will not move with the flow of what is new in the industry. Old methods do not always work during new times. Trends change and your business needs to move with these new principles to stay afloat. Research your competitors and decipher their plans of attack to enhance your own campaign. Outperform them with new and unique ways to showcase your products. Consumers are more focused on value, now more than ever. As the recession dies down, discounts will not work as well and consumers will look for true value and authenticity in a brand before making a purchase. How do your internet businesses stack up to these moving trends?
Posted by Paul Hemmant on July 22, 2010 under Home Based Business |
The goals for internet businesses often involve marketing deadlines, advertising budgets and relational aspects. Working from home, though, brings about a whole new set of goals to achieve. Without an employer breathing down your neck to get things done, you may need to set daily and monthly goals to keep your motivation at its highest. Self-motivation is essential to staying productive in online business, especially in the beginning before the profits arrive.
While working online, you will need to plan short and long term goals. The short term goals will help you to avoid and eliminate distractions. Do you live with a spouse or children? Do you find yourself wandering to other websites during the day? These types of instances pose as distractions and steal our time from our work. At a job, you are forced to work in a specific environment and if you get distracted you have plenty of people to bring you back to reality. If you are in the process of developing your internet businesses, you work alone now instead of for a company and no one is standing over you to refocus your mind. In the beginning it may be tough to adjust, which is why I recommend setting daily goals. The night before or at the start of the day, determine what you would like to accomplish for that day. Give your list to someone else to check at the end of the day if you feel you need the accountability.
Watch out for the “time guzzlers”. They promise to steal you for only a minute but somehow the minutes add up and turn into hours. Don’t buy into the lie that it will only take a minute. Distractions lead to other distractions and before you know it, you are in a completely different place than when you began. Social media websites, emails, chats, phone calls – all will steal your efficiency. Turn off the phone and shut down your email, if need be, and focus on your tasks until completion.
Your long term goals will provide you with motivation to continue. They will help you to see outside of your temporal existence to your greater future. Set them months and years in advance and chronicle your progress along the way. These long term aspirations will keep your engine running and pick you back up again when you fall.
If you don’t possess a vision for your future you will have nothing in which to aspire. Consequently, if you don’t set goals for your present, you will not achieve your long term aspirations. Both are vitally connected for your internet businesses and required to experience the rewards of working from home.
Posted by Paul Hemmant on April 17, 2010 under Home Based Business |
Due to the authority and popularity of Squidoo on the web, internet businesses are utilizing the site’s power for their own benefits. Squidoo is a publishing platform which allows you to make mini one page sites (lenses) for free. If constructed properly, Google often displays these lenses on the first few pages for low to moderately competitive keywords.
This platform offers amazing functionalities, with everything from EBay auctions, YouTube videos, Amazon affiliate programs, poll modules and everything in between. You can earn money by monetizing your page or giving away your earnings to charity. You can also use Squidoo to send links to your main website. Because these lenses are indexed fairly quickly, marketers use them as pre-sales pages to lead prospects to their websites.
Learn the Language
If you are new to internet marketing, Squidoo is an excellent resource for learning the “ins and outs” of the industry. You will learn basic HTML and affiliate marketing, and how to interact with an online community. Squidoo offers many tutorials and a forum which includes knowledgeable lensmasters who are willing to help with any issues that may arise.
Search Engine Optimization
When constructing lenses for your internet businesses, keep your search engine optimization principles in mind. Practice building one page websites with a specific subject matter. Stay focused on one area or your lens will confuse your visitors and the search engines. Create a keyword specific domain and optimize module titles and content to reflect your keyphrases. Add appropriate tags so interested visitors will find you in the Squidoo community. Create a bio and add a photo of yourself. The default image and bio will turn your visitors off and they will not click on your links.
Another great strategy is to develop a few lenses with the same topic but slightly different subject matters. Link them together in a chain link fashion with Lens #1 linking to Lens #2 and Lens #3 to #4 and so on. The last lens can link back to Lens #1 creating a mini website effect.
Build Community
Squidoo has a large community of lensmasters who visit each other’s lenses, rate them and comment. Visit other lenses in your industry and encourage interaction. Rate and comment on theirs as well and they will return the favor. Communicate with others in the forum and offer help when needed.
Squidoo represents a great platform to enhance or introduce your internet businesses. Spend some time researching the site and getting familiar with its network of users. Offer value with each lens, optimize and promote them effectively and see a steady increase of traffic to your website.
Posted by Paul Hemmant on January 16, 2010 under Home Based Business |
Tell me the first thing that comes to your mind when you I say Nike. “Just do it!” How about when I say “Coca-Cola”? “Red”
Those are just two examples of the way those corporate giants made you associate simple words or colors to their name.
Apparently Santa Clause lost his well known color red to Coca Cola. That’s because he doesn’t do or care much about his “business”. I guess he knows we’ll never forget him come Christmas time anyway.
But you on the other hand, you will be forgotten, unless you are a famous legend that I don’t know about. So, what do we do to stay on people’s minds all the time and therefore make our Internet Marketing Business successful?
Simple. We need to brand ourselves. We have to have our own personal branding that people will remember. And it can’t be just anything. It has to be related to what exactly you do, but in a clever way, so people notice, or hear it, smile and say “how clever is that!” and once you get a reaction like that you will always be remembered. It’s like interactive learning – much more successful than passive memorization.
So, think about a color, a saying, a smart way to name your Internet Marketing campaign or company. Be creative and then stick with it. Don’t change it in the middle of the process. You saw what happened to the big giants like Coca-Cola when they tried to change their look and taste. They were rejected, pushed to the side by their dozens of millions of fans, so they paid a lot of money to learn that lesson. Let’s learn from their mistake as well as from their success stories.
Now, don’t fall into the perfectionist trap and delay starting your business because you can’t think of just the right name, or quote or color or whatever it might be that you want yourself to be definite by.
The moment is now! Bring your closest friends together, your family, your neighbors and whomever else you want – Santa Clause is busy, sorry – and brainstorm it. Sleep on it and then make the decision and go with it. “Just do it!”
Posted by Paul Hemmant on December 31, 2009 under Home Based Business |
Office politics, your boss constantly breathing down your neck and earning a lot less than what you know your work is worth are just some of the reasons which could convince you to look into starting your own online home based business. However, if the thought of venturing into the unchartered territory of starting your own online business still leaves you sceptical, here are 5 reasons guaranteed to convince you otherwise.
1. You get to stay in control of your life. You choose the hours you spend at work, you choose the kind of work you want to do and you set your own rules. Because you are your own boss, you get to work from within the comforts of your own home as well as have the added benefits of running a home based business, which being virtual, is completely mobile and can go wherever you go; on the train, on vacation, to the park. There are no limits.
2. It doesn’t cost a lot to start your own online home based business. In terms of the initial investment you make into your business, the amount you are looking at investing is minimal. This is a significant selling point, with money being very dear to most people in light of the current global financial crisis.
3. You won’t have to fight off too much competition. The recession has impacted most businesses in practically all business segments. As a start-up online business, you have the advantage of going into the online business world with your eyes open and in possession of all the facts. This makes you better equipped to mould your business to the changing economic times, and navigate it towards being successful.
4. The potential income is limitless. Because you are your own boss and employee, you decide what you charge for your services. This means that you don’t get short-changed. You get paid exactly what your services are worth.
5. You get to enjoy the long-term benefits of trusting your instincts and taking that leap of faith. Once your online home based business is off the ground and you have a regular clientele who are willing to pay for your services, not to mention a set of systems in place that work best for you, you can start putting your feet up and watching your business run itself and willingly turn its profits over to you.
Posted by Paul Hemmant on December 30, 2009 under Home Based Business |
Posted by Paul Hemmant on September 28, 2009 under Home Based Business |
When you start up an online business from your home there’s a certain degree of nervousness that comes along with it. Will you succeed? How difficult will it really be? Did you learn everything you needed to know before you got started? Will people really want what you have to offer? Those are important questions, but another question that a lot of people forget to ask themselves is how much risk they can actually handle and what level of risk is acceptable to them. Not asking that question – and not getting a firm handle on the answer – can be a serious downfall for any business. Most people feel that there is inherently less risk in an online business because the cost of starting it up is often lower than a brick-and-mortar style business, but financial risk isn’t the only concern.
People risk their reputations, their time, what they can offer to their family, and other things when they create an online business. If they don’t market their business well and no one buys from them, they will lose the money that they spent for their Web site, their product (unless they are only offering a service), their advertising, and anything else that they paid for, such as their Web hosting. They might have also paid to incorporate their business, they may have had to buy licenses for their city, county, or state, and some of them have cut back hours at ‘real’ jobs or quit them altogether in order to try to make their online business dreams come true.
They can be led to financial and professional ruin in a very short time, even if they don’t have a lot of ongoing expense and overhead. With that in mind, think about everything that you value when considering an online business. It can be a great way to succeed, to build wealth, and to give yourself and your family financial freedom and security, but only if it’s done right. The risk must be an acceptable one before the business is undertaken, and you should take the time to determine that acceptable risk level before starting any business, whether online or off.
Posted by Paul Hemmant on August 24, 2009 under Home Based Business |
I came across these 3 great videos on Key word Research that provide will give you a great insight into Key word Research and greatly improve your online marketing skills. So what are you waiting for go check them out, but remember who introduced you to them when your traffic starts to increase.
Click Here for Video 1
Click Here for Video 2
Click Here for Video 3
Go get an education with this Keyword Research tool and increase traffic to your sites
Posted by Paul Hemmant on August 23, 2009 under Home Based Business |
There is no recession for internet marketers. It is considered to be one of the highest paying careers because there is no ceiling to how much money you can make. Sounds unreal? No, Internet Marketing is the reality.
Ask people seeming unaffected by the recession what they do. There is a high probability their answer will be that they do Internet Marketing. I’m an Internet Marketer!
Just think about it. Your Online Home based Business is global, not confined to local area. There is no limit to your potential clients.
The world is your oyster!
Don’t follow the money, let the money follow you!
To find out more information about Starting an online business go to http://paulhemmant.com/?t=Bl
Start your own Online Home Based Business
Posted by Paul Hemmant on July 15, 2009 under Home Based Business |
Office politics, your boss constantly breathing down your neck and earning a lot less than what you know your work is worth are just some of the reasons which could convince you to look into starting your own online home based business. However, if the thought of venturing into the unchartered territory of starting your own online business still leaves you sceptical, here are 5 reasons guaranteed to convince you otherwise.
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