Work From Home Training

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How Do You REALLY Get Started In Online Business

Posted by Gary Smith on December 20th, 2010

I was going through some e-books and things today, looking for some products to sell. I have no shortage of potential products from my Unselfish Marketer membership, but I don’t want to sell anything that I personally wouldn’t get any value from. Even a seven buck report has to be, well, worth seven bucks!

One thing that struck me about a lot of the reports that I’ve read is that they are a ‘what’ report rather than a ‘how’. Many of them are like an expanded dictionary definition – explaining in 1000 words that which could easily be explained in less than 100. I suspect that most people who want to get into online business already know ‘what’ things like affiliate marketing and social networking are – and if they don’t, then there are plenty of free resources that the define these things and all are just a Google search away. As to the ‘how’ of internet marketing for the beginner – that’s a little more elusive than I would have thought.

Over the five years or so that I’ve been working at home I’ve found and used some really great products. Here are a couple of my favourites.

Instant Squeeze Page Generator – Creating your own squeeze pages is at the very least a chore and at the most, frustratingly impossible – but it is important as it is also one of the best ways to build a targeted mailing list. I’ve been programming on the Internet for 15 years now and I still find the squeeze page creation process laborious if I try to do it without ISPG. ISPG takes you through a ‘wizard’ process where you fill in the gaps and it creates the squeeze page. You don’t even have to upload them to your server – ISPG can host them. You do, of course, have the option of grabbing the HTML and uploading to your server. ISPG also provides a bunch of free products that you can use on your squeeze page. It really is a very complete and easy to use squeeze page creator. ISPG has several membership levels starting with a free membership.

The Challenge – This is a free training course that was conceived a couple of years ago by Ed Dale. The format is designed to allow anyone, even those with little free time, to learn how to build an online business. Basically it consists of 7 modules. Each module is designed to be completed over 7 days spending no more than 30 minutes each day. After each module you then have a 7 day break before the next module begins. The entire course is spread over 16 weeks and the content is, in my opinion, very valuable to any budding online entrepreneur or business owner. No dirty tricks or shady techniques – just the skills and information you need to get that online business up and running. A lot of the skills and techniques are also useful if you own an offline business and you are wondering how to promote it online.

The bottom line is that you can’t build an online business overnight. You have to be prepared to do some study and spend some time on it. Contrary to what many products suggest, making 4 or 5 figures a month online isn’t ‘so easy my grandmother could do it’!

Posted in General

Tags: ISPG, the challenge

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5 WordPress Plugins I Can’t Live Without

Posted by Gary Smith on November 5th, 2010

I was looking at how many plugins I have installed here at WFHT and, for no apparent reason, started wondering what I would keep if I was told that I could only ever have 5 WordPress plugins. Makes me shudder just thinking about it – but I think I can come up with a list of my five fave plugins. Here goes…

1. Facebook Social Plugins – I only recently installed this one after seeing a retweet from Rand Fishkin. This handy little plugin makes it very easy to add a Facebook like button to all of your WordPress posts. You need an application ID, but the plugin points you right at the page where you can set up the application and I had it all done and running within 3 or 4 minutes.

2. StatPress Reloaded – I like to know how many visits I’m getting and what they are looking at… without digging around in Google Analytics. StatPress is great for getting just the basic information such as how many unique visitors came through each day/month and what pages they viewed. It does quite a bit more than that, but those are the areas that I tend to look at most often.

3. SexyBookmarks – You see that block of bookmarking links at the bottom of this post? That’s sexybookmarks! Very easy to configure and it supports many more bookmarking services than the ones you see below. It’s one of those cool plugins that you install, configure and then never have to touch again because it just… works.

4. Google XML Sitemaps – This one automatically generates an XML sitemap that all of the major search engines can read. An XML sitemap just makes it easier for the search engines to find all of the posts and pages on your blog. It is very configurable, allowing you to exclude specific categories or posts and you can even include pages on your site that aren’t directly linked to your blog.

5. What Would Seth Godin Do? – This is just a really cool plugin for encouraging people to do stuff such as subscribing to your RSS feed. It allows you to configure a brief message that is displayed to all new visitors to your blog. You configure how many times they will see the message (i.e. like for their first 5 visits to your blog) and then there’s a second message that you can display to return visitors after they have seen the first message however many times you set it to be displayed. The message can be displayed anywhere you want, such as before the post, after the post, on posts and pages or you can use a tag to display it in specific places.

So there’s my top five list. I have a bunch of other plugins that I use on my blogs but those ones are the plugins that I think are most valuable to me.

Posted in General

Tags: wordpress plugins

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Work From Home – Don’t forget about plan B

Posted by Gary Smith on October 18th, 2010

Something I probably haven’t talked about enough (though I have talked about it in previous posts) is planning. The reality is that the vast majority (probably 80-90%) of people who try to earn money online never make a dime. There’s a reason for that.

NO PLANNING

So here is a little exercise for you to try. If you are unable to get those dazzling sales pages that promise riches tomorrow out of your head, then go ahead and spend money on those sort of products. Who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky! While you are throwing money at those things, have one site – just one single site – that is about something you are genuinely interested in. Something that has a market and that you know you can write volumes on.

We’ll call this your backup plan.

My point is that, in most cases, nothing I can say will change your spending habits. If you truly believe that one of those get rich quick products is going to make you wealthy then you are going to keep spending money every month until there’s no money left. That will last for anything from 6 months to four or five years (depending how many credit cards you have).

So what’s this plan of mine about?

Simple – most people, when they get to that point where there’s no money, have virtually nothing to show for it. They’ve maxed the credit cards and they are no better off than they were when they started. If you start a blog about something that interests you, and post to it every week, then one of two things will happen. Either your ‘personal interest’ blog will gradually net you an increasing income or, if you didn’t get around to monetizing it yet, you will have a great site with loads of good info that is getting a nice volume of monthly traffic and just waiting for you to put some ‘money pages’ in there.

Doesn’t that just make a whole lot of sense? Futile as it may seem, you get to chase the pot of gold at the end of the get rich quick rainbow, but at the same time you are also building a valuable resource that you can fall back on when you find that it isn’t that easy to get rich quick.

While you have that credit card out, make sure you click on the link over to the right – ProBlogger: 31 days to build a better blog. It has everything you need to know about creating a blog that people want to read and come back to. Not written by a get rich quick guru, but a genuine professional blogger.

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Is The Plan You’re On Working?

Posted by Gary Smith on July 14th, 2010

Whether you like it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you believe it or not – without a solid plan you are like a ship with no sail. You’re not moving closer to your goals because you haven’t planned a path to those goals. There’s nothing ground breaking about that – it’s just common sense

You’re probably doing the same old thing week after week and month after month. Einstein said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Keep doing the same thing and you can bet you’re going to get the same results. The sooner you can can start following a structured plan. the better off you will be.

One of the best ways to get started if you are on a low budget or a no budget is to start building a list and earning an income in Traffic Exchanges. Opinions are fairly mixed about how effective traffic exchanges are but I can tell you that the truth is, just like many things, if you learn HOW to use them effectively then they are a great way of building your first list and starting your new online income.

Scott Douglas developed his own plan. A plan that grew his income and his list more effectively than anything else he had tried. He then offered that system, free of charge, to other traffic exchange users. Scotts Traffic Exchange Profits program has gone from strength to strength and the whole site was just recently updated and redesigned.

Traffic Exchange Profits is not only a comprehensive traffic training plan – it also provides you with the tools you need such as squeeze pages, splash pages and a complete 25 part autoresponder series. If you would really like to learn an effective way of generating an income from traffic exchanges then this is the only course you will ever need.

You can get the free Traffic Report by clicking HERE.

Posted in General

Tags: definition of insanity, doing the same old thing, exchange users, low budget, traffic exchange

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Work From Home Job Or Work From Home Business?

Posted by Gary Smith on June 26th, 2010

That question is the first one that needs to be answered before you start to develop your work at home career. There’s a major difference between pursuing an online job and pursuing an online business.

Work From Home Job

If you decide that you just want an online job then the learning curve won’t be quite as steep but the resulting income may be relatively low, depending on whether you have the skills to provide a professional service or you are only only to provide relatively unskilled services. Jobs such as proof reading, article writing and language translation can pay quite well. Jobs such as basic data entry or labelling and sending letters can be quite low paid, depending on where you are looking for work.

The rate of income varies quite substantially depending on where you are looking for work. Online job sites such as oDesk and GetAFreelancer proudly state how they have thousands of professionals bidding for jobs every day. The reality is that the businesses that are hiring people from those types of sites often pay only a dollar or two an hour – even for very skilled services such as programming.

If you are looking for data entry, proof reading or article writing types of jobs then it is best to look for businesses that provide or require those sorts of services and hire direct from their own websites. There are so many scam work at home businesses out there that I don’t have any specific recommendations. You do need to be very careful though and look for recommendations from people who are already doing that type of work.

If you own a legitimate data entry, proof reading or article writing service that hires at a reasonable rate I’d be happy to include your details in here – providing you can demonstrate that you have a legitimate business.

Work From Home Business

If you are considering building your own work at home online business then you have many more options. Let’s look at the various types of online business and some of the places you can learn how to set these up for yourself.

Selling Your Own Product

To sell your own product you would need a website, a method of processing payments and a method of delivering your product. This could require delivery via mail if it is a physical product or electronic delivery if it is a file such as an ebook. Alternatively, you could sell your product on an auction site such as eBay or an online ‘retailer’ such as e-Junkie.com.

Selling Your Own Service

Selling your own service is much the same as selling your own product online. You will probably want some sort of website and a method that your customers can use to pay you.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is all about selling other peoples products online. If you look at the right column of my site, most of what you see in there will be products that I promote as an affiliate. The income varies from around 10% to 50% of the price of the product, so if you are able to sell 10 $75 affiliate products each week and you are making 50% then your income would be $375. The best part about affiliate marketing is that you don;t need to have your own product. Even larger sites such as Amazon have an affiliate program where you can promote their products and earn a commission from each of the sales.

Niche marketing

Niche marketing is a system where you put up a whole bunch of sites about various topics and sell affiliate products from them or monetize them with pay per click ads such as Google Adsense. I don’t really think it is suitable as a first online business. It certainly can be lucrative but, contrary to what some niche marketing training sites would say, the learning curve is quite steep. That’s just my opinion of course, but I believe that you are far better off setting up a single site initially and learning how to generate income from that site before you go putting up 50 or 100 sites at once.

Membership Sites

Membership sites are a great way to make a regular and substantial monthly income if you have a hobby, an interest or a skill that other people want to learn. The way membership sites work is that you provide the content within the site and your members pay you monthly. As each month passes you provide more content. This monthly content can be set like a school curriculum where they get access to specific sections of information each month.

So, I guess you are wondering where to find out more about setting up these various types of online business. I’ll be providing more information in the coming months, but there are also some great training and online business building resources available.

First up you should simply search Google (or your favourite search engine) for the types of businesses I’ve mentioned above. There is a lot of information available for free if you just take the time to look for it. I’ll talk about some of the paid online training options in future posts. For now you should be just concentrating on learning from some of the thousands of free sites and articles.

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