ONLINE HOME BUSINESS IDEAS

For those interested in making money from home, starting an online business is worth looking into, especially if you are retiring early but are looking for other ways to have an income. People retiring early who begin working from home have seen the advantages, and are reaping the benefits, of having an online business. To start an online business requires work, of course, but is not as difficult as you may think. To get online business ideas, start with research. What skills do you have to offer? What are you interested in devoting your free time to doing? You do not need a lot of money to get started, but you do need to have a vision of what you are looking to do. Here are three online business ideas that may help you get a better idea of what you can do to become financially independent.Virtual Assistant


Working as a virtual assistant is one way to make use of your clerical and organizational skills. Responding to emails, conducting research and answering phone calls are obvious ways to work as a virtual assistant, for which there is currently a growing demand.


Affiliate Marketing


Likely one of the most popular online business ideas is affiliate marketing, which concerns the promotion of products and services done in exchange for commissions. There are literally thousands of products and services that need promotion by independent contractors like you, and many of the owners of these business are open to giving affiliates a percentage of the sales they help generate.


Website Flipping


In recent years, website flipping has grown among online business ideas for the tech-savvy. Operating on the same principle as “house flipping,” website flipping is the process of creating a website and then selling it in the future. In other words, you create an asset (the website) before selling it as an already income-generating product. Website investors, as you may know, are always interested in cultivating new websites for their portfolios. Having a clear vision of what you want in an online vision is the first step to starting your own today!

LEARN HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH AFFILIATE MARKETING

 

Many people make the decision that they want to make money online and one of the most exciting ways to earn an online income is with affiliate marketing. There are a number of programs that promote various methods that promise to help you make money with affiliate marketing, but it is important that you choose a program that has a solid reputation and a strong following of successful internet marketers.

 

Learning the basics of affiliate marketing is fairly easy, but there is always more to learn as you delve further into the possibilities of making a substantial income through affiliate sales. When you are in the beginning phases and just starting to learn how to make money with affiliate marketing, it can be extremely helpful to be involved with a forum or group of like minded individuals.


When you have questions or simply need to run some ideas past more experienced affiliate marketers, user forums and user groups are certainly an advantage. Some programs offer their own forums, but there are also plenty of free sites where you can gain information and knowledge to further your marketing skills.


One of your primary concerns will be the type of product you plan to promote. It is hard to promote something that you know very little about, so spend some time getting to know your product so that you can sell it with confidence. Additionally, you will need to be sure that you have a website or blog that will bring in the traffic necessary to convert to a reasonable level of sales. After all, a site that has no traffic will result in no affiliate sales.


In addition to knowing your product, it is important that you understand the affiliate commission or bonus that you will receive for referring customers. Each company has their own affiliate program and understanding what is required to earn affiliate commissions for each product you promote is essential for your success.

TWO GREAT WAYS TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE

Two of the easiest ways to make money online are by writing, and by selling your unused or unwanted stuff. As a source of extra income, writing for blogs or websites, and posting items for sale are both fun and easy to do and there are plenty of opportunities to do both online.The two best known sites for selling your items are eBay and Craig’s List, and both are easy to use, allowing you to keep track of your listings, edit them and post photos. eBay charges a small fee for listing items, although the site also frequently has specials or free listing periods. On eBay, you can choose to sell your item at a fixed price, allow people to bid on your item, or a combination of both.


The more you sell on eBay, the more of a good reputation as a seller you will have. EBay allows you to sell to buyers all over the country, or even in other countries. On both eBay and Craig’s List, you can literally sell just about anything, although furniture, electronics, collectibles and books are all good things to sell. On Craig’s List you are limited to local buyers.


There are dozens of sites that require articles to be written, and these sites then submit your articles to other websites or print publications. As long as you can write clearly and with good grammar and spelling, you do not need to be the world’s best writer. Most sites require you to register with them, and some will require a writing sample. The amount of work available and the deadline for submitting your work can vary, and you can expect to be paid between $2 and $10 per article, depending on its length.


With some of these sites, you are assigned an article to write; with others, it is a system of job postings and you claim any articles to write that you are interested in. Still other writing sites allow you to write about anything you like, and then make it available for anyone to buy. With so many writing sites, you really have to check a few of them out to see which work best for you; there is nothing to stop you writing for more than one at a time.

SETTING UP YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS

Without an email address, you’ve got no means of communicating with your visitors [and hopefully buyers] and they’ve got no means of communicating with you. Advertising and search engine optimization will get your site listed, and noticed, but you need a follow up strategy to maximize your marketing. Not every visitor to your site will buy. In fact, if you have a conversion rate of 10% of visitors to buyers, you’re doing very well. So you need a follow up strategy, partly to get those visitors to return and buy, and partly to encourage visitors to your website in the first place.

Every successful internet marketer will tell you that you need lists to optimize your marketing strategy, but more of this later.

An email address allows you to contact anybody and everybody you think might improve your sales, and as already discussed in the chapter on affiliate links, you might want to offer your visitors your own affiliate program, so they buy your product, and for everybody they send to your website to buy, you offer them a commission.

But here’s an important tip:

Try and get your primary address as part of your domain name

For example, if your website URL is www.potatosaladstodiefor.com, then get your primary email address as spud@potatosaladstodiefor.com Other email addresses will have a different user name, but your website must feature in each and every one, to give you maximum exposure.

Your domain ‘host’ should offer you an email address, or several if you want, as part of the hosting package.

This type of email address is also more professional than those using the email services of the major providers such as yahoo, or hotmail, or aol. Imagine your ‘targets’ receiving an email from spud@yahoo.com It looks tacky, tells them nothing about your website, and you lose a great opportunity to promote your site. If I’m into potato salad in a big way, and I receive an email from spud@potatosaladtodiefor.com, I’m going to visit. But an email from spud@yahoo.com will be deleted.

There’s a massive e-commerce business out there on the Net, dedicated to collecting email addresses and selling them on, or using them for bulk email shots to customers willing to pay the price, on a sliding upward scale according to the numbers you buy. So an email ‘shot’ to one million will cost you more than a shot to one thousand.

I have the gravest reservations about these bulk email shot providers, for two reasons:

Firstly, there are no reliable statistics of their success rate, known as Return on Investment [ROI]. In other words, out of the one million ‘shot’ mailings, how many will actually convert into sales.

Secondly, Internet Service Providers [ISP] are being much more rigorously monitored and regulated than a few years ago, to try and reduce spam emailing, which is washing over the Net like a tidal wave. In extreme case, some sites are being closed down, and in theory at least, you should neither receive nor send spam emails.

But there’s a very fine line between ‘solicited’ and ‘unsolicited’ emails, and it’s all down to ‘opt in’ lists. They work like this:

If you’re browsing on the Net, and you casually log onto www.potatosaladstodiefor.com, and then log off, your visit can be recorded and your email address ‘captured’. The ‘captor’ then assumes, rightly or wrongly, that you’re interested in potato salad, and anything else remotely related to potato salad, like mixed leaf salad, pasta salad, pastas, pizzas, fast food, you name it, the list is endless, so you’re treated as an ‘opt in’ name. Before you know it, you’re getting emails from all these websites, advertising their products and inviting you to visit.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

As its name suggests, SEO is the process of optimizing a website so that it ranks high in search engines. In an ideal world, your ‘all singing all dancing’ website should be up there in the top 10 when a surfer types in one of your keywords into his search engine. If you’re down at the bottom, worse still if you’re not even on the first page, chances are the surfer, with his short attention span, will surf on by.

Search engines want to provide their users with a valuable service, so the user instantly finds results relevant to his search. So when you launch your website, these search engines use a sophisticated and automative system of algorithms to determine rankings, and they’re changing them all the time. That’s why it’s essential to have a quality website with all the relevant keywords linked to it to attract visitors from the off!

There are two important components related to this system, and which determine your ranking:

7. Links

8. Content

If you have a quality website, in theory it should attract regular visitors, and this will show up on the search engines. In addition, if you get good links from other websites, this too will show up, and overall, will improve your rankings.

Patience is the watchword when it comes to search engines.  Whilst they are remarkably sophisticated, they have their work cut out to keep up with demand.  There are hundreds, if not thousands, of websites and blogs being added every day, and all requiring the 'once over' before they go live.  Even the big hitting search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, take time to crawl your website, so it could be days, even weeks, before you're picked up and dumped at the bottom of their rankings.

Anything that attracts your website to the search engines is the way forward, and even the slightest alterations or additions can help.  That's why links are so important, as this generates traffic which in turn is picked up.

Finally, whether it's a website or blog, content is king.  Regular refreshing is essential to hold the interest of the search engines, so a tweak here or there, or simply adding new content, even a line or two, will keep you in the frame, and with perseverance, you will move up the rankings, and with luck and application, you will reach the Holy Grail of the first page.

PAY PER CLICK

More of this later, but again, briefly:

If you’re serious about making money on the Net, and you want a swarm of traffic to your website, you’ll need to consider a Pay Per Click [PPC] strategy. I’ve already mentioned Google as the market leader, but don’t ignore the other search engines. They provide a similar service, and for the most part, they’re cheaper than Google. But remember, you get what you pay for in life, and the Net’s no different. There are hundreds out there, so suck it and see!

Yahoo are the second ranking search engine, but don't forget MSN, Ask Jeeves, and many more. Compare their rates and their service. Compare click bids on your keywords with the competition, and decide how much you can afford.

If you’re just starting out on a limited budget, don’t commit yourself to big bucks on your keyword bids. Suck it and see!

Again, there are thousands of Net programs offering instant traffic to your site, and again, most are useless, but a few are worth exploring. Check the cost, is it a ‘one off’ payment, or a recurring monthly payment?

Factor it into your budget.

ADVERTISING

So you’ve set up your website, it’s loaded with goodies to tempt even the most discerning palate, and you’ve got your carefully selected affiliate links in place. So all you need do now is sit back and wait for the millions to roll in! Wrong!

It doesn’t matter how you square the circle, if surfers don’t know you’re out there, you’re dead in the water, and all that time and effort has been wasted, not to mention your hard earned cash. You won’t make a dime unless you get traffic to your site, and again, like so many internet marketing strategies, there are thousands of programs out there offering unlimited traffic. A few are good, the rest useless.

The biggest hitter in online advertising by several miles is Google. They’re raking in $10 million a day, so they must know what they’re doing. Google claim their Adwords program reaches over 80% of Internet users, and they may be right.  And don't forget Adsense, which is free!

But don’t confine your advertising strategies to just one big hitter. Yahoo, MSN and Hostned should be included in your list of "must do".

There are many other tools to apply:

• Blogging – start your own blog and plug your products and your website. There are also free blogging sites where you can do the same thing, and reach thousands.  I shall be devoting a number of articles in this series to blogs, so be patient.  Let's go one step at a time.

• Free Directories

• Ezines

• Press releases

• Classified Ads

• eBay

All these will be explained in future articles.