Sunday 23 September 2007

Avoid Home Business Scams That Only Want Your Money

With the job market continuing to tank, more people are looking at starting a home business as a means of supporting their families. Unfortunately, many offers for home business opportunities are being made by individuals preying on the needs of others. Many internet users are finding their inboxes deluged with offers of making big money with little or no work. Secrets to making big money on the internet are available from many different companies, offered only after they “unlocked the secret” of hitting it big on the internet.

Most of the internet websites attempting to get people to send money for a guaranteed successful business, will be filled with success stories about ordinary people who were nearly broke and facing bankruptcy until they signed up for this program. Now they have more money than they know how to spend and they offer enthusiastic thanks to the person who unveiled the tricks to making an obscene amount of money for doing nothing.

There are a few aspects of internet advertising for moneymaking opportunities that should raise red flags and sound some loud alarm bells before sending any money or worse, entering your credit card information.

Beware of limited time offers that will expire in a couple of hours, if not in minutes. People needing to find a home business are often duped into signing up for a worthless program, wanting to make sure they secure their place in line before the opportunity is gone. Go back and visit the site later in the day or even a day or a week later, and chances are the same ad will be there with the same time limit warning.

Read through the entire offering in the initial ad and when you reach the end, go back and read it again. Usually there is nothing to indicate what product or service you will be selling to your friends and neighbours. If, after reading the ad a third time you still have no idea what the company is offering, close the page and delete from your online history.

It is not unusual for companies offering what amounts to a franchise for their business to request money up front. Legitimate brick and mortar businesses have been doing it for years and it’s an acceptable practice. However, before you opt in to a program, find out exactly what you will get for your investment. If it is only the right to use the name, move on. If the company wants you to pay for training materials that may be the only thing you get for your investment.

Ask for contact information about those in the testimonials to get your own take on their success. Chances are that will be “confidential” information and not available. Additionally, contact information for the company wanting you to send money now should be clearly available in their website. Hiding behind an email address is a common ploy for those looking to take your money and offer nothing substantial in return. It’s your money they want, demand answers before sending it.

Ev Burke

http://www.ebooks-health.com

Wednesday 19 September 2007

Advertising on a Limited Budget

Starting a small business can be trying under the best of circumstances. You’ve had your idea, you had the gumption and resourcefulness to acquire enough funds to open, and you’re quite sure that if enough people find out about your business, you’re going to make a fortune; or at least enough to make a living off of. But that’s the rub. How will people find out about your business in the first place? Your advertising budget may be meagre or nonexistent. If this is the case, you’ll be dead on arrival if you don’t find some free or cheap methods of attracting people to your business. Here are a few ways you can advertise on the cheap. They may not sound like much, but they’ll help get the ball rolling when you have no other options.

The first thing you need to do is get a website. You can likely find a domain name for under $10, and find a hosting service that will only charge you about that much a month to keep a website. This is essential in today’s internet age, even if you plan on doing no selling on the actual website. You can do all kinds of things with a website, and if you devote yourself to learning search engine optimization techniques, soon you can be near the top of a Google search for the genre of your business. As an addendum to this, make sure you add your website address to the signature of your outgoing emails. Getting business cards will be another step along your cheap advertising route, and you’ll want to add your website to these as well.

Bumper stickers don’t cost much to make up, and if they’re colourful and creative, people will naturally want them. Put the first one on your own car. After all, if you aren’t willing to toot your own horn, why would anyone else? Along the same lines, get some T-shirts made up and wear your T-shirt to public places, particularly places that might be hangouts for your targeted audience.

The most powerful form of advertising is, and always has been, word of mouth. If you are starting up a small business and have done even a modicum of research into what this entails, then you’ve doubtlessly heard this over and over again. What does this mean to you, though? After all, you can’t force people to talk about your business. No, but you can provide the best service, selection, something. If you are the best at what you do in at least one area, people will talk about you in a favourable light. Nowadays, it is increasingly difficult to find two commodities that should be as cheap as table salt: friendliness and good service. These two things don’t cost you a dime, but supplying them will make a big difference in the success or failure of your business.



Sunday 16 September 2007

Advantages that Online Businesses Have Over On-site Businesses

Online businesses and on-site (“real world”) businesses are definitely distinct from on another despite their similarities. This is because the communities in which they each thrive are different from one another, suggesting that the nature, usefulness and function relies primarily on the environment in which it was designed and constructed. Because these communities are different from one another, the businesses within each will have certain advantages over those businesses in the other communities.

One of the main advantages of online businesses is minimal overhead. Land tax and expenses associated with electricity, heating, and other utilities necessary to to maintain any physical location (such as a plant, store or factory) are virtually non-existent because the entire business itself is situated in cyberspace. Only monthly host site fees, business taxes, and electricity bills needed for powering the computer system are expected, aside from merchandising and marketing (advertising). This means that because overhead is minimized, more funds can go into the business itself.

Another advantage of online businesses over on-site businesses is minimized space. Internet stores consist of multiple pages covering business mission, disclaimer, registration, order interactives, condensed organized product presentation, and even forums for technical support where replies are posted for everyone to see at any time (no one need to have to remember what a particular representative has said regarding a particular service or piece of merchandise. Others' contributions add to the insight). Because the business is online, anyone wanting to shop only need to switch on the computer, go to a search engine and enter certain keywords (or enter a web address, if available, into the field), and go to the site any time of the day or night and browse through everything—without leaving home.

This leads to yet another advantage of online businesses: inquiries into services or product orders can be made instantly through the integration of interactive software. If queries are made, support can come almost immediately. Receipts for orders are sent right away to personal email accounts where they can be stored away. The significance of this is the convenience of quick and easy accomplishment of the processes involved.

Finally, one should not forget that online businesses are accessible from all over the world, ensuring that business dealings will be expanded on a daily basis compared to on-site businesses, which are limited to local or regional areas. People in Japan or Russia, for instance, can see the product line of an online business set up by a single American mother of three who is operating her venture from her small apartment somewhere in central U.S.A. With online businesses, services and clientele possibilities are virtually endless all the time.

The Internet highway is a compact yet sprawling environment where millions travel all day every day. Any business will find ongoing pleasure and growth here because of the sheer density of its traffic.

Saturday 15 September 2007

A Few Ideas on Internet Marketing

Promoting your small business on the internet is crucial in today’s world. The entrepreneur who ignores this gold mine of potential opportunity does so at his or her own peril. There is too much to be gained through marketing on the internet, and little to be lost. If your company is internet based to begin with, this is a no-brainer, of course. But things are rapidly changing on the Web, and those marketing strategies that worked a few years ago may not work as well today. Here are a few things you can do to expose your business to potential new customers that work today, but may not in a few years.

SEO. Search engine optimization. For the internet entrepreneur who wants their website to be a success, this is the first step toward ensuring that success. Unless you have unlimited funds with which to advertise your product, this is a step you cannot afford to skip. Optimizing your website is the equivalent of building your brick-and-mortar store in a major shopping district as opposed to halfway down a dirt road with an old rusty sign pointing in the other direction. Its importance cannot be overstated. There are many facets to SEO, and not enough room in this article to get into them. Fortunately, few topics have been as exhaustively written about. Do a Google search of your own, and you will find plenty to read.

Pay Per Click. This is another fine way to get your internet business off and running. This service is offered by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, to name a few. With Google AdWords, you’re going to have the most potential traffic, but you may also have the most competition for the best keywords. What does this mean? Well, AdWords (and the others) work by letting you create an advertisement (usually a headline and a couple of sentences). You then must choose the keywords that will activate your ad. Then you place a bid on how much you’re willing to pay per click of your ad, depending on each keyword. It all sounds a lot more confusing than it is. The benefit of this type of advertising (as opposed to, say, banner advertising), is you only pay when you have been ensured of a visitor. Of course, what you do with that visitor is up to you and your own marketing skills.

Articles and inbound links. Next to SEO, this is the most powerful section of strategy for the up and coming internet business owner. In order to move up in the search engine rankings, you must have incoming links (backlinks, as they’re called in the SEO world). When the search engines see a website with a lot of natural inbound links, they begin to see the website as an authority on whatever subject the site is about. Thus, the site’s ranking begins to improve. There are many ways to go about getting backlinks, but one of the best ways is through writing articles. There are article “farms” on the internet, which host your articles for free and then sell them or give them away to other website owners, who are hungry for content. This benefits you because at the end of the article you will have included your name and a link to your website. Every time someone grabs your article to put on their website, you get another important link.

There are a million successful strategies for marketing on the internet, but these are the three building blocks. Go and research them, and your business will be the better for it.