Archive | October, 2022

Whatever you do for a living whether you are a doctor, lawyer,
home business owner or delivery driver it is important to know how
to stay focused on your work. Not having this ability can make or break
your productivity and leave you wondering why you are not getting
anywhere in life.

It can be easy to be distracted by: phone calls, social media, family,
friends, significant other, pets, investments, school, bills and countless
other things technology nowadays sucks us into when you do not
know how to stay focused on your work.

You must always remember why you are in the field you are in.
What was your reason for wanting to get your job, business? Was your
goal to make more money so that you can share in the lives of your children?
Was your goal to be out from under the rule of a tyrannical boss? Was your
goal to have the freedom to work when it is convenient for you? Was your
goal to make tons of money working for yourself?

Here’s a few good tips that will help you stay focused on your goals:

TIP #1:
Whatever your reason for going out on your own or choosing your field,
you must keep your reason in the forefront of your mind. If you forget your
reason for starting your own home business, you will not be working for
yourself for long. It is far too easy to let circumstance drive your activities
and when circumstance is in the driver’s seat, you are more likely to crash and burn.

TIP #2:
Some people go to work to play, some go to socialize, and others —
most often those who are paid in a commission or tip environment
— go to work to work and to make money. Your salary is directly
proportional to your productivity. Therefore, wouldn’t it make sense to
stay focused on getting as much done in as short of a period as possible?

Go to work to work and to make money. Leave playtime and
recreation for when your workday has ended.

TIP #3:
When you are dealing with family in the course of your workday,
it is important to schedule your activities as much as possible.
With small children, you must take time when you must, but you
should also work hard to make sure you dedicate a specific
number of hours to your workday.

With older children, it is much easier to tell them that you
will be working between the hours of x and y. Your children and
your friends must understand that certain hours of your day are
devoted to the activities of your business.

TIP #4:
Don’t permit your friends and extended family to run over you.
Many people get the blind idea that if one works from home then
they are not actually working.

Well-meaning people may try to fill your doorway to bring advice
about getting a real job. Others may simply believe that if you
are at home, then you are fair game for chitchat and
socialization.

You must stand firm. You must make certain your friends and
family understands that when you are working, then you ARE
working! If they wish to socialize with you, then they need to
do it during the hours that are not dedicated to your home
business.

You are the only one who can stand up for you. Your friends and
family will seldom be able to appreciate your dedication to your
home business, unless you make the effort to make sure that they
have the same respect for your business that you do.

TIP #5:
You should allot a certain portion of your day to email and to
regular mail. For example, allot one hour in the morning and one
hour in the afternoon to handling your written communications.

Unless you dedicate certain times to the handling of these
communications, you will soon find yourself on the downward
slope of decreased productivity.

TIP #6:
When you find yourself spending too much time doing
non-productive activities, then you should seriously consider
finding a third-party service provider who will assist you in
those non-profitable business activities.

As an example, you might be in the mail-order business. You
might believe that your time is best spent writing ad copy and
setting up your advertising, but you find yourself spending far
too much time taking care of your books to take care of your
advertising in the manner that you should. In this event, it
might make more sense to hire a bookkeeper to handle your
financial records for you.

CONCLUSION:
In the end, the success of your home business is entirely and
completely reliant upon you and the decisions that you make.

You had your reasons for deciding to start your own home based
business. You must always keep your reasons in the forefront of
your mind. You must always be able to rely upon your own self
and your dedication to the success of your business.

Your friends and family might be annoyed that they cannot come
visit upon their own whim, but when success comes to you and
your business, they will better appreciate you for putting your
foot down when necessary.

Success is within your reach, if only you can stay focused on
your goals. You must decide to reach for your goals, and then,
you must have the discipline necessary to reach them.

If you have any questions of concerns comment below and I will
gladly respond in a timely manner.

Whether wanting to make some income on the side or actually
make enough to quit their day job these days a lot of people like
yourself have asked themselves how to start a home business on
a budget. People are looking for a way out of the rat race towards
a life of financial security.

A lot of people who have this idea are not in the wrong. We all
want peace of mind knowing that the bills will be paid and then
some. Most just have no idea how to start a home business on a
budget. In this article we will cover practical ways you can implement
starting today that can set a foundation for your online success.

Taking the cautious approach to a home based business and
keeping one’s job during the start-up period is often a very
good decision. By maintaining one’s job, one can maintain the
health of their personal finances while permitting their home
business grow healthy and strong.

Fortunately, most home based businesses can be started with
little or no cash, can be maintained on a shoestring budget, and
can be operated successfully with only a part-time investment.

One day, the business will be strong enough to support itself
and its owner. When that time comes, it will make good sense for
the business owner to leave his or her outside job to dedicate
more time to growing and maintaining their new thriving home
based business. You will know when that time has finally arrived.

The nature of a home based business makes it easy and very
realistic for most folks to take the plunge into home business
ownership.

Yet, many folks put off starting their own home based business,
because they have the misconception that they will have to risk
thousands of their own hard-earned dollars at start-up. Then
later, if their business fails, they fear they may be forced to
take out a second mortgage on their house just to stay out of
bankruptcy.

Are you one of these folks? Do you let your fears of failure
keep you from reaching for your dreams?

If so, then allow me to introduce you to a few home business
ideas that you can start for less than $100 and can be started
and operated very profitably as a part-time business.

THE LIFEBLOOD OF ALL SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSES

First of all, let me advise you to search out a business model
that will deliver steady and repeat business. It is the one
thing — above all others — that will assure that your
company can survive the test of time.

HOME-BASED MAIL ORDER:
Home-based mail order is a good example of how one can quickly
grow a home business income. Mail order is a low cost start-up
business that can be launched for around $100 USD.

With proper planning, your home-based mail order business will
not require up-front inventory purchases. In the mail order
business, it is not uncommon to rely upon drop-shippers for
product fulfillment services.

By utilizing drop-shippers, we can sell the products, collect
the money and then purchase the products from the wholesale
outlet. The wholesale outlet will then put a return address for
your company on the product packaging and deliver the product
directly to your customer.

Your primary expense in the mail-order business is advertising.
Classified advertising tends to be a relatively inexpensive form
of advertising with thousands of outlets available to the small
business owner.

WHOLESALE BUSINESS:
Buy low — sell high. You can acquire high quality,
top-of-the-line merchandise for a fraction of the retail cost.
Starting a wholesale business would require a Wholesale Dealers
Directory as your source for merchandise, such as the one above.

AUCTIONS:
Auctions can be an excellent source for buying cheap and selling
high. Both government auctions and Internet auctions can lead to
some excellent profit opportunities. Auctions are an excellent
tool for both acquiring and selling merchandise.

MAKE AND SELL YOUR CRAFTS:
Crafts are a hot seller at country fairs, swap meets or anyplace
where people gather. Make your own crafts and sell them for a
tidy profit!

SELLING INFORMATION:
Selling information by mail is another good example of an
inexpensive home based business start-up. One can gain the
resale rights to information for usually about $50 USD. Other
costs will include printer cartridges, paper and postage. There
are plenty of free classifieds sites on the Internet, in which
to successfully advertise your information.

WRITE INFORMATIONAL BOOKLETS:
Write and publish your own informational booklets; sell them at
a high price! All you need is a little know-how, a printer,
paper and stamps. This is a GREAT home business idea! You can
also sell the resale rights to others, for extra profits. In
this age of the Internet, you may also take advantage of the
fact that selling information is one of the most profitable
endeavors one can pursue online.

OFFICE SERVICES:
Offer office services for hire in your local paper. You’ll be
surprised at the amount of regular office business that can be
gleaned from one little classified ad. Word processing, typing,
accounting, data entry, proofreading, transcription, promotional
letters and newsletters. All these tasks can be accomplished
right from your own home office.

AVON REPRESENTATIVE:
Yes, Avon’s been around for eternity, hasn’t it? Then it’s not
such a bad prospect as a home based business, is it? I once knew
a woman who did so much business as an Avon rep. that she had
people calling her and knocking at her door wanting to order
products at all hours of the day and night! Once you are an
established Avon representative, you, too, will turn a good
profit.

CONCLUSION:
On your search for the ideal home based business, try not to get
caught up in any scams that will run off with your money. There
are thousands of scam artists out there just waiting for the
next sucker to come along. Remember, if it sounds too good to be
true, then it probably is. Just use your good judgement and
invest wisely in proven methods of earning extra income.

One of the most important aspects of affiliate marketing is how to gain website traffic, because you can also have bad traffic which will do nothing but bog you down. Also you have to work on keeping them coming with proper engagement.

Why do you desire traffic? Traffic translates to more views. More views if well managed leads to more revenue. If you know how to gain website traffic correctly. This can be split into four main types, mainly:

1. Direct Traffic

These comes from people that are already aware about your brand and visit your site directly by typing your site name into their web browser

2. Referral Traffic

This is the traffic that comes to your site through external links from other web pages.

3. Organic Traffic

These come to you through online searches which is aided through Search engine optimization.

4. Social Traffic

People visiting your site through links on social media like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and others.

5.Paid Traffic

These are made up of Adwords, Remarketing and others.

So how do you now drive traffic to your site? Well, we’ll be looking at a combination of factors working together to bring about the desired result.

1. Attention Grabbing Topic That Pulls Traffic

Why do some topics appeal to you more than others. You are going through a page and suddenly you pause and hover above a title or topic and you click on it to find out more. Most likely it caught your attention because it was catchy and inviting. This is how topics should be. You should also make sure it captures what is in demand and people are actually searching for. Google Trends is particularly useful in this regard which brings us to our second point.

2. Analyzing Your Headline

“On average, 5 times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. When you’ve written your headline, you’ve spent eighty cents out of you dollar” -David Ogilvy

Very true. When you enter a search term into a search engine and the results are displayed, you scan through the headings looking for something that is alluring or perhaps outstanding before reading anything else.

This is where a headline analyzer comes in. Coschedule is a good choice, fast and very effective. It does a complete analysis of your headline offers you some tips for improvement.

How tos, List and questions are particularly good and should be exploited. Emotional and power words are also important if you want to ignite the fire in your headline.

3. Meticulous Keywords Research

It is important that you research the keywords that are appropriate for your posts. This is essential if having visitors flood your site is important to you. If no one is searching for the words you have used in your post then you are not going to be getting much traffic to your site. Your post has to be littered with them but not impair the readability and fluidity of your post. Doing this will only turn your readers off. It has to be done just right. Tools that you can use for this include Google keywords tool and similarweb.

Things you would be looking at for include:

– How many people are actually searching for the said term?
– Will it draw the right Kind of audience?
-Will you be able to rank as well or better than your competitors?

4. Cornerstone Content

These are the most important articles on your site. They Showcase What your site is all about, and is the foundation around which everything else is organised. Cornerstone Content is also sometimes referred to as evergreen Content. This kind of Content should be written around and about keywords that you desire to rank for in search engines, and should be contained within the first few pages of your website. Your Cornerstone articles need to be detailed and exhaustive capturing every aspect of the topic. Subsequent articles you write related to your Cornerstone articles Should also overtime, be linked to these all-inclusive articles.

5. Stunning Images

Yes, and I mean stunning. Images, photos and pictures all make your article more visually appealing. We humans have a short attention span online and so you need something that will immediately capture their attention and want them to find out more. Images are gradually becoming the universal language and you need to tap in to this. It has also been found that articles with images get 95% more total Views than others. However make sure to give appropriate credits for images used or Search for and use royalty-free images so you don’t run the risk of violating Copyright laws.

6. Page Loading Time

Google considers a lot of factors in ranking websites and page loading time is one of them. If your site takes too long to load, you lose traffic.

Ways to reduce loading time:

# Remove unwanted plugins

We sometimes install too many plugins on our sites which gobbles up our server resources and makes our site sluggish. To avoid this you should

– Disable or uninstall unwanted plugins

– Instead of using several plugins
for various functions, use an all in-one plugin such as the
jetpack plugin.

# Optimize your images

Using images from various sources as found can significantly affect the loading time of the site. You can compress images using Smush.it to load images conditionally when the readers Scrolls to the bottom of the page.

# Use a CDN

This stands for content delivery network and is a network of Servers situated across various countries and help to deliver web content more efficiently. What it does is help a browser fetch data from a closer Source thereby making it load faster.

# Reduce the number of post on homepage

You can use a tool like Pingdom to analyze your blog page load speed. Example:

The more posts that you have displayed on your homepage the slower it will load- of course it makes sense. Limit the number of posts that can be displayed under settings on your page.

7. Email Campaign

Statistics Show that emails convert up to three times more than social media does. Email campaign is a worthy effort to put into your blog. All you need do is make sure you feature relevant posts or group related posts and send it as an email newsletter. Getting email Signups might prove difficult but you can use these proven techniques –

> Make subscription forms available

> Build your email list

> Select the type of campaign that you want – Newsletter,

offer, Announcement e.t.c.

> Create your campaign

> Measure your result

8. Get on online forums

Forums where questions are asked and answered is a very good place to hang out and establish a presence. Watch out for topics and queries that your posts are relevant to and soon you will build a legitimate following.

Sites like Quora and Reddit can give you immediate exposure to over 1 million monthly visitors. Provide links back to your blog posts in the answers you provide on the forum and watch your audience grow.

9. Make use of SlideShare

Slideshare is useful in complimenting your blog content and pulling traffic, a lot of it. If done right, your slideshare can even go on to be more popular than the blog post itself. Make sure you provide a link back to your blog in the presentation.

10. Frequency and length of post

The more often you post articles the more traffic you’re likely to get and we are not talking of just any post-quality well researched articles. If you feel you cannot keep up with the pace by yourself, you can engage writers on sites like freelancer, Guru or upwork to make up.

Longer content not less than a thousand words usually get a better ranking in search engines than shorter ones. They are also often shared more and linked to so increase your number of post and give them extra length.

11. Make use of content curation sites.

If you are sure of the quality of your articles, you can submit them to these sites that are constantly looking for good content to give their readership and expect some good traffic.

Sites that you can submit to include –

-> Blog Engage

-> Tribber

-> BizSugar

12. Ease of Sharing

The presence of social media sharing buttons of your page or better still on your posts is a most. It makes it easy for readers to quickly share and spread your posts. Facebook, LinkedIn. Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and others are all useful.

13. Guest Post

Featuring on other blogs that point to your target audience will help to gain readership and awareness about your brand, so to speak. You are able to take advantage of the goodwill of others and get traffic back to your blog. Make sure you provide a link back to your blog and ensure your posts are stellar. You get backlinks and the more you get, the more you’re likely to rank higher in Search engine results. The guest site will also benefit from this because they will be getting fresh and unique content from a different point of view. New life you might say. It’s a win- win situation.

14. Links

Linking to another site’s page from your posts, referred to as outbound links helps Google to rank you higher. What’s more the site you link to may be also link back to you. Outbound links provide your readers with extra resources and material to help them in their search for answers and information.

You can also link from one post to another post within your blog, referred to as internal links. Backlinks has already been mentioned above.

My Take

The issue of traffic- getting it, Keeping it and growing it has become a focal point on which every aspiring, serious and result oriented blogger cannot afford not to take seriously. After all, the main purpose for blogging or any other online activity at that, is centered around the Numbers.

What’s the use of writing a good post that people don’t get to see or read. It is only when our audience grows, we get positive feedback mentions and shares that we will be encouraged to produce better post, and don’t forget the revenue that might accrue from all the traffic.

If you have any questions about anything mentioned in this article comment below and I will gladly reply.

Affiliate marketing is able to draw so many people in because there’s a myth going around that it’s an easy thing to do. In this article I am going to share affiliate marketing techniques for beginners. Pushing someone else’s product might seem simple on its face. But this will only be as difficult depending on your ability to focus on good sound training and then put it into practice.

The same profitable affiliate marketing techniques for beginners are the same super affiliate marketers are using to make a full time income on the internet. Ensure that you’re only focusing on affiliate marketing by making sure your desktop is free and clean, and also tidy up a bit in your immediate line of sight. Multiple studies show that a cluttered desk equals a cluttered mind.

Do not fall for schemes from so-called experts in the field who want to sell you on their affiliate marketing products. Believe it or not, every single piece of information you need to know about marketing can be found free of charge from multiple places online. The only benefit of a purchased program is that it gives you the information without searching.

A great affiliate marketing tip is to branch out and try out different affiliate programs. You don’t have to stick with the giant networks. Go to your favorite vendor and find out if they have their own affiliate program. Each program is different, so you should never settle with just one.

Nothing is quite as important in affiliate marketing as correctly identifying your audience. Understanding that there are different niche markets within every niche market will help you to only target those potential customers most likely to purchase a product. This saves you a lot of time and helps you make a lot more money.

All of the information that you learn about affiliate marketing is not going to do you any good if you do not absorb it and put it to good use. Learn as much as you can and then use that knowledge to begin building what could turn out to be a quite profitable website.

Look for affiliate programs that are not only on the front end but also the back end too. Affiliate programs that offer a higher commission to you are looking to generate your business for some time to come and will offer back end programs to benefit you while retaining your business.

Check the conversion rate of customers that turn into sales before you commit to an affiliate program. Your time will otherwise be wasted on directing customers to their site. Check their website to see if it would make you want to buy something. If not, you may want to continue to look for another program.

As you’ve undoubtedly learned from the tips provided in the article above, you are essentially the company “the brand” even though it isn’t really your product. You still have to treat affiliate marketing as your legitimate business, and the tips you’ve learned throughout this article will help you to brand yourself online.

Comment below with any questions and I will be happy to reply.