Working at Home with an Internet Based Business
If you search on Google, you can find thousands of millions of searching result about ‘working at home’ (in fact at the time of writing there are 155,000,000 results in Google.Com for this search! This shows that many people are dealing with home based business now and many are using the internet That’s good because internet is a gold mine as long as you know how to work on it.
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As newcomers will soon find out, persistence is the most important factor for success (as it is with any business). You can not start earn £1000 every month just after you start a home based business. However, many people quit this opportunity after just 1 or 2 months with no results.
How long it will take to make a reasonable income ? You will need between 6 months to a year, after that, you can start gain back from your hard work as long as you keep on with your internet promotion activities.
So, what kinds of activities should you use to promote your online home business ? We know that you need to increase your website’s exposure, the more targeted visitors, the more sales.
First, you need to invest money to have a good website built. Make sure that it loads quickly and is readable, try to avoid "splash" pages when the website first loads. Remember KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid - not everyone can or wants to sit through a flash presentation of your business.
Secondly, publicise your site - think about all the paperwork you generate and emails that you send to friend and collegues, is your website address (URL) where it can be seen. Note that this is not the same as spamming emails to millions of people that you do not know. Do you run a car or van, why not put the website address on it, there are several options from sign writing through advertising decals to magnetic signs?
Third, visit popular search engines, like Yahoo, Google, Bing etc, work out who the top sites have links from and try to get links from similiar sites. You can offer to place a reciprocal linking on your own website if it helps get a link. Try to get links from sites that are in the same field as you, but it's probably not good to link to competitors in your area. If you feel that this is too difficult have a look at our search engine positioning page or our SEO blog posts.
Another thing that you should do is keep your content fresh - gone are the days of building a page and leaving it for years. Search engines like fresh articles and regular updates to websites.
Finally, before signing up on any website for a "work from home" scheme, check out all the details carefully, there are still some sites out there that promise the earth for £100 a year - ask yourself, "am I really likely to make a living working at home and doing this?".
There are many other ways to promote your website and some of these will be examined in future articles.
Also, don't forget that if you expect to make any profit you should talk to an accountant about your tax position. We have a few accountants listed on our accountants page and our searchable Accountants Directory that say that they specialise in the small and medium business sector.
© John K Mitchell :2005
Forest Software
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