Archive for the ‘Technical Tips’ Category

Many home business owners maintain a blog as part of their overall business efforts, and for many affiliate marketers it is the lifeblood of their business. A number of successful bloggers are also now being sent dozens of products to review on their sights or are paid for their opinions.
New rules (not laws yet) that the Fair Trade Commission intend to implement on December 1st 2009 may change the face of the blogging business for good. According to the new rules a blogger must state clearly in their posts if they are being paid for their opinions or if they have received goods or services for free for review purposes. The penalty for non compliance with these rules could be a fine of up $11,000 per infraction.

Read the rest of this entry »

An effective email marketing campaign can do wonders for a home business, if you do it right. The trick is to make sure your message makes it past the spam filters, which are getting harder to navigate every day.

Buying a list of email addresses from a broker is certainly not the way to go these days. As these people have never heard of you, or your business you can be assured that 95% of the carefully crafted emails you send out will hit the recipients “junk” folder immediately, never to be seen again.

Instead you need to create a good permissions based list of email addresses. This can be achieved by simply adding a “join my mailing list” button to your website or creating a simple guest book and offering a “share this” option increases the size of your email address even further.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you have a home business with an online presence (and these days who doesn’t?), finding ways to drive more traffic to your website is likely often in your mind.

One of the things many spend a lot of time agonizing over are “keywords” they should be using to draw traffic to their site. You can hire a dozen different SEO specialists and it is likely they will all give you a different answer. So why bother with all that fuss and expense in the first place; especially since one of the most powerful keyword tools available anywhere is free?

Read the rest of this entry »

Do you have a knack for marketing and selling but, very little in the way of available capital to set up your own online store? Would you like to work at home but, dot have a product to sell or service to offer? A turnkey website could be the work at home  solution you are looking for.

These sites are sold “prebuilt” to varying different degrees. The fact that most come with a payment system and many of the tools one needs to sell online already included saves a lot of money on web designers and other Internet “experts”. There are numerous options such as affiliate marketing sites, dropship sites, AdSense sites, and others. You essentially choose what type of product/service you want to sell from one of the turnkey operations. You purchase a pre-built website and start selling. For those without website developing skills this might be a good option. However, the downsideis sometimes only a limited amount of customization available, meaning that you might have to do a lot of offsite web promotion to get customers to buy from your site.

Read the rest of this entry »

Most home business owners these days count a personal computer as one of their businesses’ main assets, indeed many could not operate without it. And close to 90% of these computers running on a Microsoft operating system.

Today marked the launch of Windows 7, the operating system that many hope will be a distinct improvement over the much maligned Windows Vista OS, which annoyed some users so much they elected to stick with, or even downgrade to Windows XP. Which, at eight years old is a “software dinosaur”. But is it really worth the small business owner taking a chance (and $100+ out of their budget) to upgrade to Windows 7?

Read the rest of this entry »