A LOOK FORWARD FOR HOME BUSINESSES
by: Cary Christian

In our small business newsletter tonight we discussed a few ideas and concepts that I believe are extremely important and deserve some emphasis in the coming year. Now its your turn!

I'm going to keep my articles for the next few weeks a little shorter because I know most of you are swamped with the holidays and have little spare time for reading ezines.

So let's get started. Here are a few things you need to build into your plans for the coming year if you haven't already.

1. How's your website coming along?

Don't have one yet? Item number 1 on your agenda. You MUST have one. It's not that expensive anymore and there are a wealth of tools available to help you build it without knowing any programming.

I don't care what you're selling. If you're only representing affiliate programs, you still need a website to effectively presell and to set yourself apart from the hundreds or thousands of other affiliates selling the same products.

If you're selling your own products, forget making any sales if you're using a cheesy free site or don't have a site at all.

I got an email the other day from someone wanting to do a joint venture with me. They didn't have a website. In fact, they didn't have a computer at home. They were using a friend's computer to make the offer and I needed to call them if I was interested. How much credibility do you think that email had in my eyes?

Is $20 a month too much to pay to establish your credibility online? I don't think so. There's no other entrepreneurial gateway with such an inexpensive entry fee.

2. Start your first paid advertising campaign.

If you're still using only free advertising to sell your products or programs, it's high time you set up an advertising budget.

Start with the pay-per-click engines. You know I like them a lot. I like them because they work. You pay for what you get. If you prequalify your visitors properly in your description your return on investment is going to beat any other type of paid advertising you can find.

You can set up a PPC campaign with anywhere from $25 to $50. If you bid properly, this will represent 250 to 1,000 prequalified, highly targeted prospects who arrive at your site already very interested in what you're selling.

If you need a quick refresher on how to use the PPC engines, see our article titled "Using Pay Per Click Engines on a Budget" at http://www.peakconsultinginc.com/Articles/PPC_Engines.htm

If you're just starting, I would recommend using the FindWhat PPC rather than Overture because you can get better keywords less expensively while still getting good traffic volume.

If you're representing a quality product or program and write your description well, your sales are always going to exceed your cost.

3. The money is in the list.

It really is. You need to begin building an opt-in list if you haven't started already. In the meantime, you can use other people's lists by advertising in ezines, but that can get expensive, so you want to build your own list as quickly as possible.

Think about some of the Internet "gurus" that seem to make money hand over fist without even trying. How are they able to do that? Well, it helps when you have a mailing list of 100,000 to 2,000,000 people to mail to every time you promote a new product. Even if you've only got 10,000, that's going to be profitable for you.

When you have your website up and running, you'll be able to add people to your list as long as you have some type of information to provide them that is useful. Discover what you have to offer and start offering it!

True to my word, I've kept this short. But if you concentrate on the three ideas above and start putting them into action, you'll soon be seeing results that put a smile on your face!

Copyright (c) 2002