Is Your Home Business A House Of Cards?

We all like to think that our home businesses are as solid as a rock. But what about yours? Is it REALLY as solid as you think it is or is it just a house of cards?

It's difficult for us to realistically look at our business model and determine if it's solid or not. That's where this article comes in. It's going to force you to take a good hard and long look at your business model. Hopefully, by the time you're done doing that, you'll have a pretty good idea of whether or not it's solid or a heartbeat away from crumbling to the ground.

The best way to do this is with an example. Do you remember the Made For Adsense sites of the early part of this decade? Marketers were making a killing with them, if you recall. Then what happened? Google decided that all these crappy sites (and yes, they were crappy) were worthless and put an end to them. They got removed from the SEs and all of the income dried up overnight. I won't even get into how many people lost their Adsense accounts. Many home business owners never recovered from this.

Okay, let's take a good hard look at this model. What was the one thing that it depended on? It depended on Google's Adsense program...a third party site. In this case, the marketer had no control over the program itself, in particular, the TOS of that program.

If Google changed the rules, which they did, it could have adversely affected the income of each home business owner...which it did. In fact, these changes in policy may have been the biggest disaster in terms of adverse effects on home business owners in the history of earning on the Internet, maybe next to Ebay banning the sale of digital products...another business killer.

Do you see where I am going with this? I know it's hard to predict the future, but you need to look at your business model and see how much of it is within YOUR control and how much of it is being controlled by a site like Google or Ebay? If the answer is more is being controlled by other sites, then you have a business model that is a house of cards waiting to fall down around you.

Once you recognize this, you can then take steps to correct the problem...even if that means you need to come up with a whole new business model.

Of course you can always just hope and pray for the best.

To YOUR Success,

The Relationship With Your List

I really hate cliches. One of the worst ones in the Internet marketing business is, "The money is in the list." This couldn't be farther from the truth.

The money is in the relationship that you have with your list.

A list that is abused is not going to be responsive and is not going to make you much money, if any at all. Okay, so how do we get that key relationship with our list that ensures that we make sales on a consistent basis? This article will show you how.

Probably the first and most important thing is to make sure that the list you're building is going to have a chance to be responsive to your offer. That comes with pre-qualifying them. How do we do this? It's actually quite simple. On the opt in page that we send them to, simply make it crystal clear as to what they will be receiving once on your list. If it's a free report, tell them exactly what's in it. If it's a newsletter, tell them what they'll be receiving in it and how often they'll be emailed. You don't want there to be any surprises for your prospect after they've signed up.

After you've done that, the next step is to actually follow through with your promises. Too many marketers make empty promises and never follow through with them. This is a perfect way to kill your list. So if you say you're going to send them a weekly newsletter, make sure it goes out every week? Don't email them everyday if you said they'll only hear from you once a week. That's flat out deception and your list will turn on you for it.

Go the extra mile. Send out an email to your list asking them what they'd like to see added. Maybe they have some suggestions for improvement. Listen to what your list has to say to you. If enough people ask for information on a certain topic, give it to them...even if it means you have to do some extra research. Give them surprise freebies once in a while. Make them feel special. If you have a blog with an important entry that you think will be of benefit to them, send a link to it.

Ultimately, you want your list to trust you. If you give them lots of free and useful content and treat them with respect, you'll find that you've built a list that will be responsive for a long time to come.

To YOUR Success,
Pete

What's More Important...Demand Or Competition?

This battle will probably go on until the Internet itself burns out like a super nova. What's more important when it comes to picking a niche? Is it the amount of demand for that niche or is it how much competition you're up against? This post is going to try to answer this as objectively as possible. I have no doubt that you will find this fascinating reading.

Let's take a hypothetical example. Let's say that you had a product that could make people fly just by popping a pill. Now, let's suppose that the demand for this product really wasn't that great at all. I mean, how many people would REALLY want to be able to fly on their own? Okay, so demand is very low. However, if you were to go to the Internet to see how many competing sites there were, you'd find that there were absolutely none for the keyword phrase "pill that allows you to fly". With no competition, how many sales do you think you would make? You'd make a sale to everybody who wanted to be able to fly by taking a pill.

Okay, the above example is totally ludicrous but I think you get the point. If the competition is low enough, even if the demand isn't that great, by having a corner on the market, or close to it, you can make quite a few sales. That's why many marketers go after what they call, long tail keywords. These are phrases that don't get many searches each month but have so little competition in the SERPs that the sales are sufficient enough to make going after those phrases worth while.

Having said that, what if you were going after a keyword phrase that had one million competing sites or more? Well, if that keyword phrase got 300,000 searches a month, there is no question that the market is there. The question is, can you take advantage of it? While this may not be as easy as cashing in on the niche with no competition, it can be done. With a little work on SEO, some intense article marketing and even some PPC promotion, you CAN get your piece of the pie. See, with a market that big, no one person can possibly dominate it. Even Google only has a 50% market share as far as people who use their search engine.

So the answer I'm going to give you is this. Depending on how much demand and how little competition, either can be the indicator you want to go off of. Little demand but low competition, go for it. High competition but amazing demand, go for it.

Either way, you really can't lose.

To YOUR Success,