WC Gem’s Home Based Big Money Business

How do you decide on the best web page techniques to help you communicate effectively with your projected visitors? This is a pressing problem that a lot of Internet marketers face after they have set up their websites

Quite often many Webmasters set up an anonymous, official looking website. Then they use a writing style that is full of sales jargon that seeks to persuade the visitor to buy their product or service.

 This kind of approach is really backward because it focuses on the desire of the website owner to sell products rather than on the needs of the website visitor. Before you can even think about selling anything to your visitors you need to think about where they are coming from and what information they need to know in order to feel comfortable on your website.

You can be sure that if they don’t feel comfortable when they arrive on your webpage they will very quickly leave and you won’t see them again.

So what kind of things should you tell your visitors? And how should you be presenting that information? Here are a few guidelines:

1. Tell them who you are. Use your real name and it will help even more if you post a photograph of yourself on your webpage.

2. Tell them in a clear concise way what your website is about and what it can do for them. Another way to look at this question is from the visitor’s point of view. Imagine that the first things your visitors ask when they visit your website are, “What can I do here?” “What’s here for me?” Answer these questions plainly and clearly.

3. Tell them why your website is the best place for them to do it. This is where you establish your “unique selling proposition”. Remember, your unique selling proposition should be communicated in terms of how it will benefit your visitors. If it is a unique feature of your products, then you need to show your visitors how it represents a unique benefit for them. The key here is not to try and “sell” the product, but to “tell” the visitor how the product will benefit them.

4. Write an editorial and not a sales letter. Remember to focus on the need of the visitor for information and fulfill that need. An editorial webpage will have specific headlines, quantifiable data, and can also include testimonials from people who have tried the product. One thing to avoid, however, is a fake product review because people can see through them very easily. If you decide to recommend a product on your website, be sure to purchase it and thoroughly test it yourself so that you know what you are talking about.

You should be able to describe every stage of your relationship with that product in authentic detail. You should be able to talk about the purchase, payment and delivery, packaging, instructions, and how the product lived up to your expectations.

5. Keep your layout and design clear, simple and specific. The more links and banners there are on your webpage the less likely it is that your visitors will follow the desired path through your web copy on any given page. Double and treble column web pages divide the reader’s attention. There should be a clear path through your webpage from beginning to end. The headline should be as specific as possible and important information should be made prominent so that the visitor will see it as he or she stands the webpage.

6. Use graphics to emphasize the incentives behind your offer. We are talking here about guarantees seals, photographs of testimonial give those, and so on.

7. Offer a cast iron 100% money back guarantee for any product you sale.. Repeat the guarantee on the sales form, or directly above or below the sales button.

There are many more things to be said about sales pages; even debates between the use of long or short sales copy. However these seven tips will help you to avoid some of the most common mistakes that inexperienced marketers make when setting up Internet sales pages for your work at home business opportunity.
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Facebook is fast becoming a big rival of Google and  Facebook Ads are increasing at a rapid rate. Not only that, Facebook now has over 400 million users worldwide, 100 million of whom live in the USA.

As a result Facebook has become simply too big for a serious Internet marketers to ignore. Even so I think that the majority of home-based Internet entrepreneurs have not even begun to consider Facebook as one of the most important weapons in their Internet marketing strategy. This Feeling exists in part because a lot of people still think of Facebook as being the place on the Internet where you link up with your friends and family and therefore feel uncomfortable mixing social chat with business promotion.

If that’s the case why not create multiple accounts in Facebook? Unfortunately, Facebook strictly limits each person to just one Facebook account (http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=12839).

So what do you do if you want to tap into the huge amount of traffic that is available on Facebook? You’re probably not ready to buy Facebook Ads. And you don’t want to clog up the news feed on your personal Facebook page with a lot of business messages, sales pitches and comments from “friends” who you have never met and who are hoping for a chance to do business with you.

The answer to that question is to simply edit your newsfeed to accept posts from people you want to hear from. That is a good way to clean up your Facebook page without deleting business friends from your list, but it doesn’t do much to help you publicize your business brand.

The real solution to the problem is to take advantage of Facebook pages. A Facebook page can be used to market a specific product or service through your Facebook account. Once you have a page set up you can promote it and invite other Facebook users to become “fans” of your page. Fans are not the same as friends and they won’t show up on your main Facebook site although news from any pages that you become a fan of will show up in your news feed.

Setting up a series of Facebook pages for each of your products or services is a great way to tightly segment your Facebook traffic into specific audiences and to keep your business activities away from your social activities.

You can post text, photos, videos, discussion boards and numerous other Facebook applications to your page. The page will also provide good link possibilities to your other webpages and blogs.

Speaking of blogs, you can set up blog feeds on your fan pages and publicize your fan pages on your blog

How well your fan pages do will depend to a great extent on the effort you put into them. Some pages are simply popular because of their subject matter. Currently one of the leaders is the “young educated women” category. If you can find a product or service to match that niche or another popular one you could be on your way to a successful online business opportunity.

Facebook pages are free and easy to set up. All you need to do is go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php to get started.

So now you have built up a list of subscribers. You’ve even provided them with a regular newsletter full of useful and interesting content. Now what do you do? You should be thinking about increasing the number of ways that you can monetize your list.

You may say I thought the main purpose of my e-mail newsletter was to provide my subscribers with useful content and to use that as a means to quietly promote my own home based business opportunity. That is true but once your list has reached a certain level of several hundred, or several thousand subscribers (depending on the nature of your business) it becomes reasonable to feature other people’s businesses and products in your newsletter and make money from doing so.

Here are some other ways you can monetize your list:

1. One quick way to make some extra money from your list is to feature other peoples business products in your newsletter. And the fastest way to do that is simply to join affiliate programs and to feature the company’s products in your newsletter. Test the products and write well balanced product reviews and editorial pieces about the companies you are affiliated with.

2. If you have a large list, consider selling some space in your newsletter for banner ads and classified ads. Banner ads will work with HTML formatted newsletters but not with plain text mailings. Classified ads will work in any newsletter format.

3. Set up a book review section and review books relevant to your business niche. Add affiliate links to the Amazon bookstore. This won’t make you a lot of money, but it will contribute to your bottom line and provide interesting content for your readers.

4. Find someone who runs a good quality newsletter in a similar niche to your own and who has a good-sized list of subscribers and set up an article exchange. Those out one of his or her articles to your list and have him or her send out one of your articles to his or her list. This is a good way to leverage the value of your list without compromising the privacy of your readers.

5. Whenever you have some old stock that you want to clear, offer it to your list first at fire sale prices.

6. If you sell a range of products, look at ways to bundle them up into packages that you  can offer at a discount to your list.

7. Offer a basic product that includes silver and gold upgrades. For example if you sell an information product, you can also offer an audio and video/DVD as silver and gold upgrade options.

8. Send your subscribers e-mail alerts about new product releases with special price reductions before releasing the new products to the general market. This makes your subscribers feel special and gives them an incentive to remain on your list and to continue reading your newsletter.

9. Set up special “thank you” pages for your newsletter customers so that when they buy a product from you they will be presented with an extra special discount offer on the backend.

10. Create an exclusive members’ site for your newsletter subscribers that way you can gather together all your offers and make them available in a single place.

These are some of the many ways that you can monetize your list. Don’t try to do them all at one time. Experiment with one or two of the methods. Once you have some success you can begin trying others. Success with any of these ideas will help grow your list,  further enhance your relationship with your subscribers and market your home based business opportunity.

It does not matter how small your business is, building and cultivating a list of people who are interested in receiving e-mail from you can make a big difference. If your Internet business does not have an opt in e-mail list, and if your web page does not have an opt in form for people to add themselves to your list, you are neglecting one of the most lucrative aspects of building a big money home business on the Internet.

If you want to build a list of subscribers who actually read your e-mail messages you should avoid the temptation to over sell your business. If every single one of your e-mails does nothing other than try to persuade your subscribers to buy your products or join your business opportunity you will probably be disappointed with the results. Most likely your subscribers will quickly stop reading your messages.

 Try to build a relationship with your subscribers instead of trying to sell them something, It is important that you think about what your subscribers actually want from you. What they probably want is useful information about the market niche that your work at home business opportunity is serving. They also want to be entertained. So right from the beginning make sure that you inform and educate your subscribers with lively, entertaining and cheerful messages. Then you will be able to introduce them to your products and services later.

 It is really a matter of finding the formula that works best for you and your subscribers. The point is to show them that you are an expert in your field whose judgment can be trusted, and to entertain them in the process. Warm and informative newsletters are vital to winning over your subscribers, and winning over your subscribers is of course important to your ultimate objective which is building sales for your home business opportunity.

The great thing about an opt in e-mail list is that it  gives you the opportunity to build a trusting and lasting business relationship with an unlimited number of people for no more than the cost of a professional auto responder service and the time it takes you to research and write your newsletter messages. It is important to build and nurture your list without pressuring them to buy your product or service. Once you have won them over you will have turned strangers into customers for life.

Are you finding it difficult to find subject matter for your blog? Perhaps there are time constraints preventing you from blogging regularly. Perhaps you just find writing blog posts a chore.

If that’s the case you may want to consider the use of PLR content packages.

PLR stands for private label rights. If you buy an information product that comes with private label rights you can republish that information under your own name. Private label rights vary from package to package, but in most cases you will have the right to modify and rearrange the content.

When purchasing private label rights articles to republish on your blog, make sure that you have permission to modify the content. This is important because the PLR product that you have bought may well have been bought by hundreds or even thousands of other Internet marketers. Remember, the purpose of your blog is to publicize your homebased business opportunity. So if you simply post unmodified PLR articles on your blog, it may save you a lot of time, but you will, most likely, end up getting penalized for duplicate content on Google.

So it is important to make some changes to a PLR article before posting it on your blog.  Most importantly change the title and rewrite the first paragraph and the closing sentence. Beyond that, you should make a few changes to the main body and if possible add some original content of your own to the article. One useful way to modify your PLR article is to insert your own keyword phrases, and work your modifications around them. You need not spend more than five minutes modifying any PLR article, but the more changes you make to a PLR article the better it will be for your blog when the search engine spiders crawl your latest posts.

If you feel uncomfortable with the idea of posting PLR articles on your blog, you could use them as sources to help you write your own completely original articles on similar themes. This will prove especially effective if you find it difficult to think up new ideas and write about them.

If you decide to use PLR articles, understand that like any other market, the PLR content market has a great variation of quality. It is quite possible to find offers of 1000 or more articles for five dollars. However, before you rush into making such a purchase, consider two things:

1. What is the quality of the articles? - In most cases you get what you pay for. Cheap articles are often full of poor quality offerings that are lacking in content and horribly written. As with anything else, it is important to do your homework and look out for good quality PLR packages that will do your blog justice.

2. How many times has the PLR package been sold and published on the net?- Another problem with cheap packages is that they will have been sold hundreds or thousands of times over and uploaded to numerous websites with hardly any modifications to them. So it is important to look out for good quality packages that also come with maximum subscriber limit.

There are many high quality PLR article writers. Remember, you are also building trust among you readers as you promote your home based business opportunity. Don’t struggle to keep your blog updated.   Modifying good quality PLR articles and posting them on your blog maybe the way to go.

It can be disheartening to invest your time setting up a blog and posting regularly to and then have no one come read your words of wisdom. If you have this problem, don’t despair. There are three things you can do to build traffic to your blog. These techniques are easy to implement and will add just a few minutes to the time it takes you to complete your blogging routine each time.

The three techniques I am talking about are: pinging, tagging and bookmarking. Let’s look at each one.

Pinging

You should get into the habit of pinging every time you post new information on your blog. It is quick and easy to do and it is a fast way to get some extra publicity - and traffic - for your blog.

When you ping you are sending out a signal to a blog tracking service informing it that that you have posted some new content on your blog. The tracking service will then crawl your blog to look for the new content and add it to the blog tracking site. It will also automatically inform subscribers that new content has been posted to a particular blog. Pinging is a great way to get your blog registered quickly on search engines because the search engines feed off the information that is provided by blog tracking sites.

If your blog platform is Blogger.com or Typepad.com your blog post will be automatically pinged. However, you will not be able to add to the list of ping services that are used by these two platforms. If you want to ping to multiple services in order to reach a bigger audience then you will have to do so manually, or use a submission service such as Feedping.com/.

If you have set up a WordPress blog on your own domain you will be able to automate the process of pinging to numerous sites. Wordpress offers a default list of sites that allow you to add many more services to the list and have WordPress automatically ping them every time you update your blog post. You can add to your Wordpress ping list by going to Control Panel, then Options, then Writing.

Tagging

Get into the habit of adding tag words to the foot of your blog posts. Tags are simply basic keyword terms that will help people find your blogpost on social bookmarking sites and search engines as well is on the blog platform itself. If you want to find why tags are important, check out the tag links on http://technorati.com/tag/.

Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking

Web 2.0 is a generic term to describe websites that allow visitors to contribute and/or modify information on the website. Typical examples of Web 2.0 sites are blogs that allow comments, social bookmarking and social news sites such as Reddit.com, Digg.com, Propeller.com and Stumbleupon.com, and sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Whenever you post fresh content on your blog, be sure to submit your post to several social bookmarking sites. Many blog platforms allow you to do this by adding a button widgets from the various social networking sites which you can then simply click on to submit your blog post. Another option is to see if the social networking service gives you the option of placing a button to speed up the submission process.

Just by doing these three things you will stand a much better chance of getting your blog posts noticed on the net and of attracting a stream of targeted traffic to your blog.

 Previously I discussed the concept of paid blogging networks. Let’s now take you through the registration process to set up a blog account with the Internet’s leading paid blogging network, Payperpost.com.

The whole paid blogging setup process can be completed in less than ten minutes and you will be all set to start earning some cash from your blog.

The two ways to go with paid blogging services are self hosting and remote hosting: self-hosting and third-party paid hosting.

Self-Hosting

With self hosting, you could in theory host the blog on your own hard drive and try to cope with all the hassles of administering it and keeping it online. For most people that is simply not practical. There are much better and more productive ways to use your limited time! That is why the vast majority of bloggers who choose to host their own blog use a professional web hosting service as their platform.

This is not difficult. All you need to do is open a web hosting account (Hostgator.com and Bluehost.com are currently popular options for this type of thing), get a domain name and point it to your blog platform. By far the most popular blog platform for self hosting is WordPress.org. A good web hosting service such as Bluehost.com will enable you to install a WordPress blog platform with a click of a button. Pointing your domain to the blog will be just as simple.

With this model, the blog platform itself is free, but you do pay for hosting and for your domain name for a total cost of about $100 per year.

The chief benefit you get from self hosting is that you have complete control over what you do with your  blog. However, to some extent, you have to work things out for yourself. If you have set up a WordPress site you may sometimes need to refer to WordPress.org for help, or failing that, seek out help in a forum that deals with blogging issues.

In spite of that, WordPress.org is easy to plug in and to use. It also gives you great flexibility in terms of blogging, monetization and blog design. WordPress has thousands of different blog designs, and more are being produced by independent designers every day. It is possible to completely change the design of your whole blog in less than a minute via your control panel. Everything can be plugged in and unplugs or moved about quickly and easily.

Third-Party Paid Hosting

Third-party paid hosting gives you the freedom to build a full-blown business blog, and the security of knowing that many of the issues will be dealt with by the logging company. Typepad.com is the leading model of this kind of comprehensive service. Typically, third-party paid hosting gives you both security and control as well as a wide range of professionally produced templates so that you can set up a fantastic looking blog plus full professional support to help you with any technical problems that you may encounter.

With both self hosting and third-party paid hosting options, you can build a complete website around your blog and post static HTML pages such as sales pages, or terms of service pages, as you wish. With blogging 2.0 technology you can also control access to your blogs and if you wish, turn your blog into a complete membership site with password access restricted to your members or subscribers.

So as you can see, there are several options available to anybody wishing to start a new blog. If you are eger to make your blog a part of your business, or to build your business around your blog, then making the right choice will be vital for you from the start. So consider exactly what you want your blog to do and then make the appropriate choice.

If you want to set up a business blog, let’s examine the kind of blog platform you should choose.

Basically, there are three types of blogging option available to you: remotely-hosted free blogs such as those provided by blogger.com or WordPress.com; self-hosted blogs such as those provided by WordPress.org or MovableType.org; remotely-hosted paid blogs such as Typepad.com.

In this article I will look at the pros and cons of using free blogs for business purposes.

Free Blogs

Blogger.com is an example of a free blog and is fast and easy to set up compared to the other two options. Free blogs are an excellent resource for anybody who just wants to write about their hobbies or interests without any concern for monetization. This does not mean that you cannot make any money with a free blog. After all, Blogger.com is part of the Google empire and as such, you are encouraged to hook it up with the Google Adsense program.

However, free blogs have terms and conditions that may have a negative impact on your ability to do business. Also, you do not have ultimate control over the fate of your free blog. If the company that is hosting your free blog thinks that you are in breach of the terms and conditions, or if the terms and conditions changed but you did not notice, they may simply shut your blog down and you will have lost all of your content.

A paid site, on the other hand, will give you much more leeway for making money with your blog and promoting it as part of your business. Additionally, if you host the blog yourself, you will not run the risk of having it suddenly shut down.

Another disadvantage of running a free blog is that the blog URL will include the name of the free site in the title.

For example, if you start a free blog on blogger.com and want to use the term “besthomebiz” the URL will be besthomebiz.blogspot.com and everybody will know that you are running a free blog. That is why bloggers who are seeking to build a unique brand around their blog will always choose a paid blogging option so that they can use a unique domain name to contribute to their brand-building efforts and to give them a more professional image.

So, while a free blog is a great way to learn all about how to blog, in the end if you are serious about building your business (and your brand) you will not want to use this option, especially when you consider that the paid options are not so expensive after all.

In future articles I will look at some paid blogging options for business bloggers.