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Working from Home is growing at a phenomenal pace around the world. Thousands of home business opportunities are available online and new ones surface every day. How do you decide which business is right for you? What business tools are available for you to automate your home based business? Above all, how do you succeed with the home business you choose?
The most important thing a successful, money making, home-based business can give you is "Time Freedom".
What do I mean by that? Everyone has 24 hours in a day. If you were to retire at age 65, and a business from home allowed you to retire at age 43, you just bought 22 years of life! WOW! Would you rather have time freedom at 65 or 43? (It's a no brainer...)
Money is not everything....
however, it can buy you Time!
How much is your time worth? Are you happy? Do you have clear goals and dreams? Do you have a plan? or Do you have messes?...
"You MUST Clean your messes Before you can Become Wealthy!"
Now, lets get to business!
"You've tried many home business opportunities
and always lost money!"
WHY!
YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR THINKING AND HABITS!
Myhome.biz is committed to teaching the 95% of people
that lose money trying multiple home businesses,
How to change their daily habits and way of thinking!
The reason 95% of people lose money over and over again in business opportunities is the fact that they keep doing the same thing over and over, using the same thinking and habits that lost them money the last time! WHY?
We have created 13 steps to succeeed with a Home Based Business ... We will go into detail on each of these steps if you join our newsletter.
These 13 steps are very Simple however, Not Easy.
1) Clean your messes!
2) Practice the law of attraction.
3) Have clear concise written daily/monthly/yearly goals.
4) Use mentors for spacific objectives.
5) Contemplate the power of intention.
6) Eliminate or tune-out negativity in your life.
7) Deligate, and only do things you love to do.
8) Develop a vocabulary of the top 5% income earners.
9) Educate yourself. Learn from mentors in the left column.
10) Find a business opportunity that excites you and learn everything about that business (become an expert - a teacher).
11) Under promise and over deliver on every transaction!
12) Take responsibility and always tell the truth.
13) Practice total commitment to the above twelve steps.
There you go, You have the Steps!
If you think this list is overwhelming,
I suggest you watch
"The Secret"
then come back and look at this list again.
If you think there is an easier softer way, go try it.
Remember we are here for you when you hit home business bottom and are ready to think like and become a Millionaire.
An Interesting Fact:
Every 2 Seconds another person joins the Internet Community!
Every 11 Seconds another person starts a Home-based Business!
MyHome.biz is an ever evolving website, providing links to vital resources helping our members successfully build a second income or replace their current income by providing a high value FREE service that anyone, that has a burning desire to change their life, can duplicate!
We sift through all the Scams
and give you the tools, tips, and information you
need to succeed, all in one place!
Home based business owners face many critical issues in starting a home business. What type of business to choose, how to get started, how to organize a business entity, zoning and licensing concerns, building codes, community and government regulations, and much more.
We are committed to helping our members successfully create residual income from home by providing comprehensive benefits, services and support. Have the best of both worlds: the tax advantages of working from home, plus the benefits traditionally reserved for employees of large corporations.
Partner today with MyHome.biz the leader of helping people create a passive residual income that exceeds their living expenses, making them infinitely wealthy.
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Finding Your Niche
The internet has ushered in the age of niche marketing. Anyone with a product targeting a small niche can set up a business online.
The key to being successful online is to focus on a niche. Unless you're backed by millions of dollars in funding, it will be very difficult to compete with giants like Amazon.com.
But you CAN compete in niche areas. If people are looking to purchase yoga accessories online, they might prefer a specialized yoga store like YogaSite.com over a general mega-store like Amazon.com.
Geoffrey Moore's book "Crossing The Chasm" is widely considered to be the Bible of the Silicon Valley. Moore introduces a concept in the book called "capturing a beachhead." In a nutshell this means dominating a niche so powerfully that competitors are forced out. The phrase "beachhead" is inspired by the Normandy landings of 1945 when Allied Troops captured select beaches in Normandy and then fanned out from there to free Europe during World War II.
Once you've captured a beachhead you're in a good position to move into related niches. For example, if you're passionate about horseback riding and decide that informational products like videos and books about horseback riding will be your beachhead, you can start a site to sell these products. Once you're in a strong enough position to own your niche, you can expand into selling products or services in related niches - such as allowing people to match themselves with local horseback riding instructors or selling clothes for riders.
But you always need to start with a niche - a beachhead that you can conquer and dominate.
Evaluating the Demand for Your Product
The next step is to find out what your target audience is searching for on the internet.
Let's assume you are offering a book with guitar lessons for beginners. You need to evaluate the demand for your product.
First, use Overture's Keyword Selector Tool to find out how many people search for the keyword "guitar lessons" in a given month.
The Keyword Selector Tool is located here: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Type in the phrase "guitar lessons" and you can see how many people searched for that term on Yahoo!'s search engine in the previous month. The output looks like this:
As you can see, close to 50,000 people searched for "guitar lessons" in January 2006 on Yahoo!. Keep in mind that this is the number of searches done on Yahoo! only. Yahoo! controls about 20% of search traffic. So to get a more accurate number we have to multiply this by five. The final result is close to 250,000 searches.
This number also includes people who search for expanded keywords like "free guitar lesson" or "free online guitar lesson."
Checking Out The Competition
The next step is to use Google to figure out how you can position yourself before your audience. Type in "free online guitar lesson" on Google and you'll see a list of guitar related sites and various sponsored ads on the right.
Note: If you're trying this from outside the US, you might see less ads. This is because some Google ads are regionionally targeted to US audiences. If you're planning on selling within the US and want to check out your competition you need to add the text "&gl=US" to the end of the search result URL in your browser's address bar. Then you can see results that someone in the US would see. The full URL string is below:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF
8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2005-09,GGGL:en&q=online+guitar+lessons&gl=us
Looking at the ads above you'll see that "free online guitar lesson" is a fairly competitive area. Sometimes, however, after looking at the competitors you may feel that only 1 or 2 have great products and sites that would convert well. If you feel you have a better product and a higher performing site don't be afraid to compete.
You'll need to do some analysis to determine if you can be competitive, and you must have a competitive advantage. In this book we'll show you how to beat your competitors at the Google advertising game and how to create sites that convert remarkably well.
If you find that your niche area is hot and feel that you can launch a product in this niche - how do you ensure that your product will succeed?
At MindValley Labs, we developed an 8 step checklist that we use to determine which products will sell. We'll reveal this checklist next.
How to Design Your Product Offering
Almost anything can be sold online. Just take a look at eBay and you'll be convinced. On eBay you can buy just about anything - Ferraris, houses, stamps, works of art, shoes and even unusual items like a person's soul (yes, a man actually once sold his soul on eBay).
But what you must understand is that certain items, because of their nature, are hundreds of times easier to sell online than others.
How do you identify these items? We've identified 8 qualities that are generally found in successful ecommerce products.
Qualities of Great Online Products
Here's the 8 point checklist we use to determine if a product can be a resounding success online. We'll explain each point in more detail later.
- It's easy to store, handle and deliver.
- It has low startup and selling costs.
- The selling and delivery can be easily automated.
- It has an attractive price point.
- Room for upselling and opportunities for repeat business exist.
- You can offer free trials or downloads.
- It can be resold across other sites by affiliates.
- YOU are passionate about the product!
1. It's Easy to Store, Handle and Deliver
Storing inventory is a major hassle. Many internet products do not require you to store any inventory. Software, ebooks, audios and videos can all be converted into a digital format and be downloaded by your customers.
These types of products (called informational products) are ideal for online selling because customers can receive them immediately (and gain instant gratification) by downloading them minutes after supplying a credit card number.
You too save time and money by not having to deal with shipping, storing or packaging.
The problem with informational products is that they are easy to return. But don't worry about this. In our experience, very few customers return a good product.
If your product is a physical product, you could try to work with a drop shipper to handle inventory and shipping. A drop shipper will ship the product for you and handle returns in exchange for a handling fee. Entrepreneur.com has an excellent online resource center with information about shipping and using drop shippers.
Keep in mind that products sold on the internet need to have a high value to weight ratio. Selling a $30 bag of dog food that weighs 10 pounds is not a good idea. But selling a $30 dog collar that weighs half a pound could be a very profitable business opportunity.
2. It has Low Startup and Selling Costs
A second quality of successful ecommerce products is that they should have low startup and selling costs. It's here where the difference between informational and physical products plays a big role.
The great thing about informational products is that your startup and selling costs are extremely low. If you are selling an ebook, the only investment you have to make is the time you spend writing it. When you act as an affiliate marketer of somebody else's product, you can start selling with no investment at all.
If you're selling a physical product you can bypass the development cost by working with a manufacturer who has a ready-made product. You can buy at wholesale prices from the manufacturer and sell at retail prices on the internet.
In many cases, the manufacturer will ship for you. For example, while driving across Arizona, Bob discovered a roadside souvenir shop that sold the most incredible hand-made bracelets. Given the quality of the work and the low price, Bob was convinced there'd be a market for this product worldwide. He struck a deal with the shop owner.
Bob would set up a website, pay for advertising and sell the bracelets online. Bob would collect the money from customers online and then pay a wholesale price to the shop owner, who would in turn package and ship the product to the customer. The shop owner was more than happy to do this since he did not want to take the time to master the art of online marketing. He'd be happy to work with Bob as a wholesaler.
Bob sold each bracelet for $20 and automated the process so that the shop owner received $12 and an email notification for every item sold. The shop owner then shipped to the customer (this is the drop shipping we were talking about earlier). Bob could relax and earn $8 on every sale without having to do anything more than occasionally tweak his site.
This is an example of a product with low startup and selling costs. Bob did not have to manufacture the product - he only had to focus on selling it online.
3. The Selling and Delivery can be Easily Automated
An ideal business is one that can run on its own. Imagine if you owned a business that was generating $100,000 a year and only required an hour a day of your time. This sounds incredible - but it is definitely not out of the realm of reality. Many internet entrepreneurs get to this stage.
This is possible because the internet allows a great deal of automation to take place. Once you master the techniques in this book you should be able to create a website with a compelling sales pitch and drive traffic to your site using advertising methods like Google Adwords. Your site by itself should compel customers to buy, allow them to purchase with a credit card and automatically email your drop shipper once an order has been processed (or allow the customer to download the product if it's a digital product). All this can happen while you're asleep.
Once you get to the stage where your site is set up and converting well, your time commitment would involve answering questions from customers, optimizing your Google advertising campaign and making tweaks and adjustments to your site.
But in reality what usually happens is that you fall in love with your site so much that you continue to work on it daily to tweak, test and improve things that drive up your revenue. There's something magical about owning your own online business, providing a valuable service, and seeing real money flow into your bank account.
The more automated you can make the business, the more time you have to enjoy life and the more time you have to to improve your conversion rates and boost revenues. That's why automating key business processes is so important.
4. It Has an Attractive Price Point
One of the biggest costs you'll incur with online sales is the cost of online advertising on sites like Google and Yahoo!. The good news is that unlike traditional advertising on these sites you only pay when a customer clicks on your ad.
Let's say you sell an ebook on weight training for $25. On average, 1% of visitors to your site purchase the ebook. You pay Google 20 cents every time someone clicks on your ad. This means that if every 100 clicks on your ad result in a sale, you need to spend $20 for a sale that makes you $25. This means little profit and is not a good business model.
Now suppose you improve your conversion rate to 3% after following the tactics in this book. You also improve your product by offering additional chapters, video clips and a better guarantee and raise the price to $37. For every $20 you spend on Google, you're now making $91. This is significantly better.
For a product to be successful online, you need to create value so that you can raise the price points. For the product on weight training, creating value could mean offering customers a free downloadable 2 hour video to complement the book, an email newsletter with a new tip every month, or a 30 minute free consultation. Now you've turned a simple ebook into something worth $37 and you can turn this into a profitable online venture.
We usually only sell products that cost $97 or more. If your product is priced at a higher price, you have some room to invest in Google ads, create an affiliate program and make more money per sale.
Don't waste time creating products that sell for low prices. It's hard to make money on these.
5. Room for Upselling and Opportunities for Repeat Business Exist
Once you've sold people on your product, can you rapidly create additional products to sell to this audience?
If you can't, start thinking. Through upselling you can maximize your revenue per customer. Just take a look at the example by well-known internet marketer Armand Morin.
Armand Morin sells a software product called eBookGenerator that creates and publishes ebooks that you can buy for $97. When you're checking out, his site gives you an option to upgrade the product to a platinum edition. For an extra $97 you get an advanced version of the software with additional features. According to Morin, 70% of customers take the upgrade. Morin planned his product well.
Cross-selling is when you sell a related product to your customer base. Let's say you sell guitars online and you've steadily built up a customer list of guitar enthusiasts. What do you do with your existing customers?
Since they've bought from you, you can offer them a newsletter with free guitar playing tips and within this newsletter you can pitch related products like guitar picks, straps, and cases. This is cross-selling. You're maximizing your customer value by selling them items closely related to their field of interest.
In fact, you don't even have to create your own products to upsell or cross-sell to your customers. You can join an affiliate program and recommend other people's products. You can find a list of affiliate products from a site such as Commission Junction (www.cj.com).
6. You Can Offer Free Trials or Downloads
The majority of people who visit your site WILL NOT buy from you immediately. Your goal is to get them to form a connection with you so they can try your product and come back later when they're ready to buy.
The way to do this is to offer people compelling information that they can sign up to receive. In exchange for their email address, you can offer them free information they value.
Knowledge products are ideal for this kind of relationship. You can write an ebook on just about anything and offer the site visitor the first few chapters free in exchange for their email address. You can email them a few weeks later to find out if they liked what they read and remind them of the product you offer.
In short, by converting visitors into subscribers and then emailing these subscribers, you can bring them back to your site.
Business models that allow this are far more profitable because the site owner has a way to impress visitors with free information, build a much needed level of trust and bring visitors back to consider purchasing the product.
7. It Can be Resold Across Other Sites by Affiliates
If your product is attractive enough, you can get other sites to resell it to their audience. The term for this is affiliate marketing.
If you're selling an ebook on Amazon.com for $9, very few affiliate sites are going to be interested. They would only make around 90 cents per sale from the Amazon.com affiliate program.
But if you have a comprehensive CD and ebook combo that sells for $97 in a specialized topic, you can get sites to sell this for you for an affiliate fee of $20 - $40. Assuming your cost of production is $7, you'd still make between $50 - $70 per sale.
8. YOU are passionate about the product!
Are you passionate about what you're selling? If not - pick another product.
There are 2 reasons for this.
First, if you truly love what you're selling you'll enjoy running your site, interacting with your community, writing newsletters and serving your customers.
If not - then this is just another business. You won't feel motivated about jumping out of bed in the morning to check your visitor stats, test new copy and read your emails. And sooner or later, someone passionate and with a similar product will be able to beat you at what you're selling.
Second, if you're passionate about your product you can use this passion to build your credibility.
Family-Pets.com is run by Kate Schoeffel, an Australian veterinarian. Kate breeds and sells labradoodles - a type of dog designed to be the perfect family pet. If you browse her site you'll be amazed by how genuine the site feels. You'll see pictures of Kate's pets, articles she and her staff have written on dog care, and pictures of her family with their beloved dogs. Kate's passion for labradoodles radiates from the page and builds a strong sense of trust and connects with the audience.
So find something you'll be passionate about. This is a strong competitive advantage.
How To Market Your Product For Success
The same product marketed in different ways can create substantial differences in the amount of money you make.
Here's an example of how two sites selling the very same product can create totally different results.
In the 1990s, a change in US law allowed dealer prices on cars sold in the US to become publicly available. The dealer price is the price that a car dealer pays to buy a car from the auto maker. For consumers, knowing the dealer's price is powerful information as it allows them to haggle with the car dealer and save big money.
One entrepreneur decided to compile dealer prices on all cars sold in the US and make this list available online for a price. He sold the list for close to $100 and made hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result.
After a while a second entrepreneur came onto the scene. He decided to simply give the list away for free. He effectively killed the market for the first entrepreneur who could no longer charge any money for something that was now freely available.
So how did the second entrepreneur make any money? Well, by giving the list away for free he attracted a targeted audience of new car buyers. Since he had a large amount of targeted traffic on his site he sold ads to companies like Honda that were very interested in getting their name out to consumers who were in the market and looking to buy.
Since Honda makes a high margin on new car sales and the audience on this site was highly targeted, the site owner could charge Honda up to $100 for every thousand people who saw the Honda ad. With 10,000 visitors a day this amounted to $1000 per day in profits. So here we have two entrepreneurs providing the same product yet each in a very different way. Both made big money, but the second entrepreneur's method was better planned and executed, which resulted in lasting profits. The first entrepreneur saw his business die out.
How do you know if you're marketing your product in the right way?
Basic, Better and Brilliant Ways to Sell a Product Online
One of the easiest types of products to sell online is an informational product. This could be a book on horseback riding, web design, dog training, or in the case of this book - ecommerce optimization.
Just about anything you have expert knowledge on can be developed into a guide and sold online. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people selling informational products online do so in the wrong way.
Let's take a look at 3 ways of selling an informational product. The basic way, the better way, and what we call the brilliant way. This last way of selling your product allows you to build a multi-million dollar business out of your product.
The Basic Way
As an active user of online dating sites, Sheryl notices that many men struggle to write a decent introduction and profile to post on a dating site. As a consequence, they get hardly any responses from prospective dates.
Sensing a market opportunity, Sheryl writes a 50 page ebook targeted to men on how to market themselves better in the dating market. She prices the book at $6 and sells it on Amazon.com. She makes $3 per sale as the distributing site, Amazon.com, takes 50%.
Selling 100 copies a month, she makes only $300 a month.
Later Sheryl also decides to advertise the book herself on Google and Yahoo!. To afford pay per click advertising rates in the busy online dating market she has to increase the price of her book to $15.
At the higher price, Sheryl now sells only 50 copies a month but by selling them on her own and not on Amazon.com she now makes $750 a month. After paying her advertising bills on Google and Yahoo!, she earns an income of around $500 a month.
This is good....but far from great. Sheryl could have been a lot more innovative. Let's take a look at Marge's story, which is what we call the better way.
The Better Way
Marge writes a book on dating, just like Sheryl, but she knows that selling it online will not bring her much more than $500 a month. So she tries something different.
She gives away the contents of her book for free online. She sets up a website dedicated to dating tips. The 50 page book is broken into sections and she designs the site according to search engine optimization rules so she gets a steady stream of traffic from Google, Yahoo!, bloggers and fellow site owners who link to her site.
How does she make money? By giving away her book for free she now has traffic coming to her site. Better yet - this traffic is highly targeted and consists of people looking for dating tips and advice.
Marge makes money by reviewing and recommending various dating sites to her audience. Since the online dating industry is ultra-competitive, many websites will pay Marge affiliate fees between $10 and $50 for every customer she sends to them.
By offering free advice, her audience comes to trust her and to appreciate her honest reviews. She in turn makes money every time a visitor signs up for a site she reviews.
Does this system actually work? Well, we know one site that is successfully replicating this model. That site is Sage-Hearts.com. In an interview with SecretsofSuccess.com, the owner of Sage-Hearts.com, Rosalind Gardner, revealed that she's making over $30,000 a month just from affiliate fees.
Screenshot of www.Sage-Hearts.com
The Brilliant Way
In the summer of 2003, a very passionate and professionally trained guitar player named Quincy approached us with an idea that he had. Quincy's idea was to help people learn to play their favorite songs on an acoustic guitar in a fun, simple, and intuitive way.
Quincy told us that he had never seen any product online that made learning to play guitar fun and easy. He said, "Every guitar instruction book and DVD on the market is not teaching people how to start playing their favorite songs, they all focus on music theories and boring practice lessons!"
Quincy definitely had the passion and enthusiasm. He convinced us that it was easy to create professional looking books and DVDs at home, and that he could come up with the single best book and DVD bundle for beginning guitar players. Because we were intrigued and loved the passion that Quincy had for his idea, we told him we would go into business with him if he could deliver a killer product.
When we did some research on the potential market we were stunned by the results! There were literally hundreds of thousands of people searching online for how to play guitar! That's when we decided to help launch iPlayMusic.
Next we needed to figure out how to market the product that we initially wanted to sell for $19.95. We decided to market our product in two ways. One, we got the book and DVD listed on Amazon.com, and two, we hired a web design company to build us a fancy site so we could sell directly to traffic that came from Google.
After three labor-intensive months, we had a great product, and a very polished website. We thought the rest would be easy!
But we were wrong.
First, Amazon.com delivered a slow trickle of sales that did not add up to more than a few hundred dollars per month. Not exactly the exciting and thriving business that we had imagined. Second, our professionally designed website was not converting. We were buying lots of traffic from Google but the traffic was not converting into sales. People were simply not buying our beginner guitar books and DVDs. Because of these disappointing results we decided to go back to the drawing board. From the few hundred customers that had purchased our lessons, we knew that they LOVED our product! They could not stop raving about it.
So we decided to completely change our approach. We realized that if our beginner book and DVD was so successful, why not give some of it away for free? As a small business, it is very hard to get people to trust us and buy from us. However, it is far easier to give them something for free, earn their trust and then convert them into paying customers later. Plus, giving away some of our lessons would cost us next to nothing since ebooks and videos could be formatted into easy downloads.
We added free demos and created a free online course that customers received over two week span. We also made our instructional videos available through iTunes, which got us a lot of publicity.
We then went back to creating more content and started working on the next volume of lessons to help beginning guitar players take it to the next level! In addition to expanding our instructional "Learn to Play Guitar" lessons we also created detailed how-to videos teaching people how to play some popular guitar songs.
Lastly, we came up with the idea to create a "Beginner Guitar Bundle" that combined our lessons with an acoustic guitar. Since we don't make guitars, we contacted a leading guitar manufacturer and struck a deal where we were able to source guitars at over 65% less than retail price.
We now had a $129 product with a profit margin of over $65 per order.
This time, all the changes we made worked and iPlayMusic soon reached sales of over $1,000 per day. We haven't looked back since.
Screenshot of www.iPlayMusic.com
So as you can see - there are 3 very different ways to market an informational product online. The last thing you want to do is follow the crowd and sell your product on Amazon.com. Although Amazon.com is the easy way out, it's not very effective and you won't make the money you're hoping for.
Let's take a look at some of the products we mentioned in this tactic and see how they stack up against the 8 success factors that we outlined earlier.
| Factor | Dating eBook | Sage-Hearts.com | iPlayMusic.com |
| Easy to Store/Deliver | x | x | x |
| Low Startup Cost | x | x | x |
| Easily Automated | x | x | x |
| Attractive Price Point | x | x | |
| Upselling Potential | x | ||
| Free Trials/Downloads | x | ||
| Can be Resold | x | x | |
| Creator is Passionate | x | x | |
| Total Score | 3 | 6 | 8 |
You can use this checklist to rapidly identify if your product is worth selling online and if so, to refine your business model to make it more viable.
Your Business Model Matters
Deciding what product to sell and how to sell it is the most important decision you will make as an e-tailer. Save yourself valuable time and energy by making sure you've got a product that can sell well online.
In addition to making sure there is a market for your product, follow the 8 simple guidelines we've outlined to choose your product. The 5 stories we've showcased reveal that the marketing of your product can make all the difference.
Once you've read this book, you will have gained an understanding of internet marketing to the point where you can design a million-dollar online business. We will give you all the tools you need to successfully sell and market your own product online. Remember to sell your product the brilliant way!