Between the kids, your spouse, and your other responsibilities you barely have enough time to breathe let alone try to start a home based business. But your family could use the extra income and, even though things can get a little crazy at home, you would rather not get a job. Your only other option is to look at ways you can make money at home with a work at home business of some kind.The standard advice you’ll get from gurus about how to start a small home based business is to develop a business out of your existing skill set. For example, if you are a certified public accountant, then you would be encouraged to run an accounting business from your kitchen table.There several problems with this advice. First of all, what if you don’t want to make use of your current skills? What if the whole reason you quit your CPA job was because if you looked at one more ledger sheet you were going to scream? You will not be successful in a home based business you hate.Second, what if you don’t have any skills that you can draw from? You may be able to do lots of things but what if none of it could make you any money? If you took the advice of the gurus then you would have no business and still stuck at step one.But even if you could start a home business creating products or offering services for which you are fully skilled, is that really the best way to go?When you start a home based business, you are essentially beginning from scratch. There are numerous headaches involved with building a business from the ground up. Usually, there is licensing to obtain, product development and storage, customer acquisition, marketing and brand development, and a host of other things that must be done before your business gains the traction it needs to start making you money.Then there is the capital investment. Depending on the type of business you decide to create, you may have to invest thousands of dollars into your business before you even open your doors. The internet has made starting a home business easier and cheaper but if you don’t have any money, then you are still looking at putting in hundreds of hours of sweat equity.Lastly, most home based businesses are really work at home jobs in disguise. Since they require you to be actively involved in order to earn any money, your income will be tightly bound to the number of hours you work. This can be further complicated by the fact that you still have a household to run which means you may not have as much time available as you need to earn the income you want.A better way to start a home based business is to sign up with a direct sales opportunity. Otherwise known as network marketing, a direct sales business cuts out a lot of the challenges you face when trying to start a home based business from scratch. Investing in a direct sales opportunity is smart business because, you’ll have:* Less Startup Headaches – The company has already invested time and effort in getting the company off the ground. The products are created, marketing materials printed, and licenses purchased. All you have to do is find customers.* Lower Capital Investment – Instead of thousands of dollars, most direct sales businesses can be started with a hundred dollars or less.* Multiple Income Opportunities – In addition to selling the product directly, you will also be able to generate income through referrals and other passive income streams that help uncouple your time from your money. You’ll experience more personal freedom to do the things you want to do.If you are thinking about starting a home based business, don’t do it the hard way. Give yourself a leg up by joining a direct sales opportunity that will have you earning money right out of the gate. For more information on how I built my home based business, contact me. I’ll be more than happy to show you how I’m able to run a full time household and still make money in my business.
Home Based Business Marketing – The One Key to Success For Your Home Based Business Marketing
If you are with a Network Marketing home based business you probably started out in a blaze of enthusiasm only to find there was no home based business marketing program to go with it. You probably also found that most people you talked to did not share your enthusiasm about the opportunity you were offering. And maybe your up line didn’t have any skills to offer you either, not that they told you that at the time, right?I had a similar experience, in fact that exact experience. You not only feel let down, you feel cheated. Or at least I did. I was so excited to get into the network marketing opportunity I joined (and it wasn’t that cheap either) that I just assumed there would be a complete home based business marketing training program to go with it. I was ready to do anything and soak up every little detail of what I was being told to do. After all they did say “complete turn-key system”.It wasn’t until after I got started that I found out that the team I joined, although very successful, didn’t really know that much about marketing on the internet. They had heard of a few things that others were doing with reasonable success and he shared those, but he didn’t know the details, or really have a plan to offer me.Their success did not revolve around home based business marketing knowledge as I had expected, but had more to do with good timing with the business opportunity, a down line who were not fully positioned and were therefore handing up sales, and a couple keywords that they had managed to build their whole business around using pay-per-click advertising.An amazing outcome, but not an overall marketing strategy that could be shared to the benefit of others. Pay-per-click is a powerful method, but can be very expensive if you don’t have a very good understanding of how to use it – and there is a lot more to marketing on the internet.I knew I had to go elsewhere for help so I started scanning the internet for answers – probably like you are now, and to my great relief I found that the answers were there. The marketing training I was after did exist.What is needed by network marketers is training that focuses on getting traffic to your website or lead capture page.It needs to cover:Keywords
Copy writing
Building your list
Monetizing
Marketing MethodsThese are some of the basics and they apply to internet marketing in general but if you can get a program that is focused primarily on generating leads, it will be most beneficial. I found that there were a lot of different training systems on offer for home based business marketing and that the best option was to choose one targeted at getting fast traffic.
The Finer Points of Internet Auctions
WHAT IS A PENNY AUCTION?
Penny auctions have exploded in popularity with the massive growth of the internet. However, few people know the true origins of penny auctions.Beginnings actually stretch back to the Great Depression. Those were hard times for everyone, but even harder for farmers. Farmers struggled to bring in steady income because of droughts and crops not selling as well as they had previously. As a result, the banks would foreclose on the farmers who couldn’t keep up with their mortgage payments.
The banks weren’t satisfied with just repossessing the house, they wanted to raise as much capital as possible, so they resorted to selling off the possessions of the owners of the repossessed houses. There was not much the farmers could do about it so they began bidding ridiculously low prices, pennies, on the items while threatening others who dared to bid higher than a few pennies.
The auctions of today hardly resemble their tremulous beginnings. Being part of a penny auction today is exhilarating, fun, and addictive. It combines the selling format of auctioning with a little bit of chance factored in.Auctions are a game of strategy but also a game of luck.
The premise behind penny auctions is giving people the chance to win an item at a drastically reduced price.Auctions make that possible by spreading out the cost of the product among multiple bidders. In order for a person to take part in an auction, they must pay a set price for each bid. For example, if a person wanted to bid on a fifty dollar Amazon gift card then he would spend a dollar for each time a bid placed. If he ended up winning the gift card, then he would only have spent a few dollars for a fifty dollar gift card. Usually penny auctions sell bids in packages.
HOW PENNY AUCTIONS WORK!
The main foundation of penny auctions is the pay-per-bid format. It is the key that allows bidders to win items at the fraction of their retail value and allows the auction owners to keep their site profitable. Most y auction sites run on the same premise: people pay a set amount for each bid, whenever a person places a bid within the closing seconds of the auction time will be added, the last person left with a unique bid after the clocks runs out will win the item. There are a large variety of items that can be won, but they tend to be popular electronics or gift cards to popular stores.
There are two types of auctions: lowest unique bid auction and highest unique bid auction. Lowest unique auction sounds confusing but it is actually quite simple. A unique bid is when only one person has a bid at a certain price. Bids usually start at one penny, a bidder can then place a bid at two pennies. Until another bidder places a higher bid, the most recent bidder will be the lowest unique bid because that was the only bid at two cents and nobody bid higher. However, penny auctions generally don’t stop at one penny. It is not uncommon to find auctions that end up at a couple hundred dollars based on the popularity of the item being auctioned. However, the same principles apply for those auctions. Highest unique bid auctions follow the more traditional auction format such as eBay. The person with the highest bid at the end of the auction wins the item.
Auction site owners turn a profit by selling bids. Say twenty people are bidding on a ten dollar gift card at one dollar per bid, at the end of the auction if there were twenty bids placed in total then the site owner would have made twenty dollars with a ten dollar profit.Auctions do seem like a win-win situation:The site owner makes money while the bidder gets an item for dirt cheap. However, not everyone wins in penny auctions. The people who paid one dollar each bid but left with nothing to show for their investments will not be so happy.
HOW TO WIN!
Penny auction has a lot of chance mixed into it, but one can incorporate strategy that will help raise the chances of winning. Playing smart can make all the difference between gambling and auctioning.
The first crucial tip to winning penny auctions is to know how to manage your bids. Your goal should be to win as much as possible without spending a ton of money buying bids. Managing your bids means that you should already know how much you are willing to risk in order to win an item. The amount of capital you are willing to risk will determine how many bids you can use. Once you know how many bids you have to spend on an item, then you will be better able to manage how and when you place a bid. That will keep you from blowing away all of your bids in the first few seconds of the auction.
The next tip is to practice time management. When fighting in the trenches of penny auctions, you have two enemies: other bidders and time. Knowing when to bid is a must if you want to have success. Placing a bid when there is a lot of time left on the clock is never a good idea. You have to remember that the key to winning a penny auction is being the last one standing when the clock runs out and that each bid increases the amount of time left. It would be a good practice to wait until the last few minutes of the auction before you begin to bid.
The final tip for successful auctioning is to keep your emotions under control.Auctions have a lot of similarities to gambling, and just like gambling, your spending can get out of control. If you keep your emotions level, it will keep you from making rash decisions and blowing loads of cash. Keep your mind clear so that you can gage the behavior of the other bidders and outsmart them.
HOW TO AVOID SCAM SITES!
Penny auctions are a great addition to the web whether you want to win an item that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to afford or if you simply enjoy the thrill that comes with bidding in auctions. Unfortunately, scam sites have tarnished the reputation of the legitimate penny auction sites. However, there are ways that you can protect yourself from scamers and enjoy your auctioning without having to worry about losing your money due to dishonesty.
Checking the reputation of the auction site before you start spending your hard earned money is always a good idea. Chances are other people have tried the site before you and some of them have left reviews. The reviews are your way to gage whether a auction site is trustworthy or not. If a site is getting overwhelmingly negative reviews, then that is a clear indication that you should steer your business elsewhere.
Another tool you can use to protect yourself is checking the Alexia ranks of the auction sites. Alexia rank will give a solid view of how much traffic the auction is getting. If you see a huge difference in the amount of traffic Alexia is projecting and the amount of active bidders on the site, then warning signals should be ringing in your head. Some auction sites have been known to set up robots that automatically bid on projects in order to keep the auction going and inflate the price. That is known as shill bidding. You can sniff out those sites by comparing the traffic the site should be getting to the amount of users using this site.
CONCLUSION!
New legislation may come out later down the road that will officially make penny auctions gambling, but until then, it is a fun, exciting auction that allows one to win the item they’ve always wanted but couldn’t afford.Auctions are also quite lucrative for the site owners because of the pay-per-bid strategy they’ve incorporated. Penny auctions had humble beginnings with farmers who just wanted to get back at the banks who kicked them out of their house. More recently, auctions have enjoyed an explosion in popularity with the rise of the internet.
There are two main formats fora auctions, lowest and highest unique auction, however they both run on the same premise where the last unique bid wins the item. Winning a penny auction will require a certain amount of mental tactic and a bit of luck. However, you can increase your odds of winning by practicing certain techniques such as managing your bids wisely, learning how to work with the time, and keeping a level head and your emotions under control. When you combine those three strategies to your bidding plan, you will find that you win a lot more often.
It is important that you do your due diligence to protect yourself when participating in auctions. Not every auction is run by honest and trustworthy people. There are people out there who just want to take your money. You can protect yourself by ensuring that you only bid on sites that already have a very positive reputation from real users.