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Work at Home Truths
Click the eBook Cover to Order Work at Home Truths, by Tiffany Dow


Getting Started

Help Your Startup Home Business With Creative Marketing Strategies

by BlondieWrites on August 27, 2010

Help Your Startup Home Business With Creative Marketing Strategies

Your low startup home business may not have as much resources as your bigger competitors, but that doesn’t mean you can’t earn as much profit as they do. Use the creative marketing strategies below to make your business generate gigantic returns.

1. Take advantage of the holidays.
Holidays give people a valid reason to spend more than usual and it’s a reason that most grasp eagerly with both hands. You need to take advantage of this by offering special products, services, or promos.

Christmas, for instance, is the season of giving and as such, if your home business can offer products that make perfect Christmas gifts, your business is sure to enjoy fantastic sales during the holidays.

Valentine’s Day, on the other hand, is a time for romance so you need to focus on pleasing customers not as individuals but as couples. Your strategies will be even more effective if your low startup home business can offer products with distinctive offers for boyfriends and girlfriends, engaged couples, and married couples. Consider as well those who are still in the dating stage as well as those who are planning to get back together.

2. Interact with your customers.
You need to strengthen and deepen the relationship between your business and its customers.

Many businesses use blogs to interact with their customers, but you can make your blog more effective by giving it a creative layout. Creativity can also be seen in the purposes it serves. Instead of merely posting entries and encouraging readers to post comments how about including polls in your entries?

Blogs are an avenue for you and your customers to bond. Scour the news for relevant reports that will be of interest to your target market. Post them on your blog then ask them the usual if-you’re-in-their-shoes questions.

3. Hold contests.
Don’t be lazy and make do with raffles and the usual question-and-answer contests. Make things more creative and your readers will be excited to join them not just for the prizes alone but also for the entertainment value.

Storytelling contests are fun and wildly entertaining. If you have an online jewelry shop, for instance, you can ask your readers to create the most romantic or adventurous legend for famous gems like diamonds, rubies, and sapphires.

Design contests are just as popular. Going back to the online jewelry sample, you can ask customers to contribute their own jewelry designs.

Prizes for the competition don’t have to be exceptionally expensive. In most cases, anything would do as long as it’s free and attractive to your customers.

4. Make a program.
There are two ways for you to create a program for your low startup home business: firstly, you can create a show by regularly uploading videos on YouTube. Secondly, you can have your own “radio” show by regularly uploading podcasts online.

Uploading videos in YouTube is for free. Video marketing is extremely effective for all kinds of businesses because customers can see, read, and listen to your message. You must, however, make sure that your content takes advantage of the extensive AV effects offered by videos. As for podcasts, you simply need to prioritize both content and sound quality.

Talk show format is the most popular reporting style used for marketing videos and podcasts. You don’t need to invite famous personalities as guests. You just need to discuss the most interesting and popular topics and your shows can help make your low startup home business profit!

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Have an Online Health and Beauty Store

by BlondieWrites on July 24, 2010

Have an Online Health and Beauty Store

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What is Affiliate Marketing?

by BlondieWrites on July 3, 2010

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is many things. Affiliate marketing can provide the necessary tools for the creative and hardworking individual to venture out on their own. Affiliate marketing can provide the opportunity to earn money doing what you are good at. Affiliate marketing can allow someone to use their skills and expertise for there own financial gain, rather than the financial gain of another person or entity. Finally, Affiliate marketing can get people started in their own business enterprises with nearly no cost or risk to themselves.

Affiliate marketing can do all of those things and more. First, Affiliate marketing is perfect for the independent hardworking individual. Many of us are stuck in day to day jobs. We work incredibly hard and receive little reward. There is nearly no incentive to work harder. When you work in the field of affiliate marketing, the world is your oyster. You paid by your performance so the harder you work, generally the better of you’ll be. When you work as an affiliate, you are working as a representative of another company. However, your reward is directly linked with what you produce. If you’re someone who frequently gets good results at work then this could be a great opportunity for you.

Next Affiliate marketing can provide the opportunity to earn money by doing something that you are good at. Those that have a knack for sales and marketing are perfect for affiliate marketing. Those that are creative and used to hard work can also make an excellent living. Your skills will be used to work for you. If you have a natural knack for these kinds of projects then why not have them increase your bank balance and not someone else’s? As an affiliate, anything that you do to increase sales or traffic if it is internet based will benefit you and you directly. The company won’t get rich while you say poor. You’re the one who will reap the rewards.

Finally, Affiliate marketing can get someone started in their own business at nearly no cost or risk to themselves. Many of us would love to work for ourselves. The two main reasons why we don’t are money and risk. You need a decent amount of capital to start even a small business. The risk involved is also tremendous with more than half of small businesses failing in the first year. Affiliate marketing can get you started working for yourself. They handle all of the products and advertising and you just concentrate on selling. If yours is an internet based program, you concentrate on increasing traffic. Most of these programs are free or involve very low initial start up costs. You’re paid according to how well you do regardless of how the company is performing.

If you have dreamed of working for yourself then affiliate marketing can be your dream come true. You can make money based on your hard work. You are the one rewarded for your efforts, not a boss or a group of shareholders. You don’t have to worry about financial risk. The head company will take care of all the detail allowing you to use your skills to the best of your ability. If you’re creative, hardworking and want to be your own boss, consider the world of affiliate marketing. Your skills and expertise could be increasing your bank balance, not someone else’s.

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What You Need to Know About Affiliate Marketing

by BlondieWrites on July 3, 2010

What You Need to Know About Affiliate Marketing

Well you have finally done it. You have packed in the rubbish job and told your boss exactly what you think. You have taken the plunge and made the decision to begin your own affiliate marketing business. Affiliate marketing can be very lucrative. It provides people with the opportunity to work for themselves with very little risk to them. Those that are sales savvy, good at marketing and are not afraid of a little hard work can often do incredibly well with an affiliate marketing program.

Affiliate marketing sounds easy but you do need to exercise some caution. You want to avoid the affiliate marketing pitfalls that can ruin your business and worse, have you crawling on your hands and knees back to that boss that now knows how you truly feel.

People tend to get excited when they start a new venture. Unfortunately this excitement and eagerness can cause them to miss key things in their agreement. Whenever you sign up for an affiliate marketing program, you will be expected to sign an agreement. The terms and conditions of the agreement for both sides should be outlined. However, if they want to hide something this is where they will put it. It will either be in the small print, so get your magnifying glass out, or they will baffle you with legal language. Either way, you need to read and understand your agreement thoroughly to avoid disappointment and lost earnings.

If you are signing up for a commission based affiliate marketing program then you need to understand how the term revenue is defined. This is one of the biggest pitfalls of the contracts. They may advertise 5-10% commissions but it all fall on how they define revenue. Most affiliate marketing programs will calculate commission on the gross value of the sale. In other words, the amount of money the site will get at the completion of the sale. You may think that this sounds great. However, you need to read this part of the agreement very carfully. The amount of the sale almost always excludes credit card or debit card payment surcharges. They also are likely to exclude payment and delivery charges as well as any gift wrapping or other surcharges. What sounded like a nice commission is soon shrinking before your eyes. Ask these questions specifically before you sign an agreement.

Some affiliate programs are even stricter in their definition of revenue. Your commission may be based on the profit margin of the sold product. For example, if you help sell a book for 20 dollars but the company only makes 10 dollars profit, you’ll receive a percentage of 10 dollars not 20. This can make a substantial difference in your earnings. Again, make sure you understand these things and ask specifically what your commission will be based upon. Read your agreement and look out for odd sounding clauses. These could come back to haunt you later.

Something else to beware of when you work on commission is returns. Many affiliate marketing companies only pay commission out on completed sales and then only if the customer keeps the item. If they return the items your commission could be cancelled. To really rub salt in the wounds, you could be billed for the outstanding commission if you do not have sufficient commission credit built up. Make sure you understand this before signing on. You cannot expect a company to pay you a commission on an item that is returned but make sure you understand their return policy. Find out your rights in this situation.

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to earn money. If you have good sales and marketing skills then it can give you the opportunity to out them to good use. You’ll be able to work for yourself and not someone who undervalues and does not appreciate them. One needs to consider affiliate marketing carefully. Make sure you understand your agreement and exactly what you will be paid for. You don’t want to have to go crawling back to your boss begging for your old job back.

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Building an Ebook Empire

by BlondieWrites on May 5, 2010

Building an Ebook Empire, by Tiffany Dow

Building an Ebook Empire

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Start a Home Business – Top Ways to Earn From Home

by BlondieWrites on April 22, 2010

Start a Home Business – Top Ways to Earn From Home

Home based business are on the rise. The internet makes it easy for people aspiring to transition from a traditional 9-5 or make some extra money from home. Here are some of the top ways to earn from home.

#1 Freelancing

Freelancing is simply selling a service without a long term contract. You can offer any number of services. Writing, graphic design, transcription, editing, audio creation, photography, and even voice over services can all be offered as a freelancer. Freelancing gives you the ability to pick and choose the projects you work on and whom you work with. It provides you with the freedom to set your rates and to choose when you work and when you don’t.

#2 Information Marketing

Information marketing is exactly what it sounds like, it’s making money by selling information. We’re an information hungry society and we often turn to the internet to help solve our problems. Whether you need to stop back pain, learn how to train your dog or learn how to be a parent to your teenager, we all have problems we want to solve.

Many times information marketers make their living writing books and reports. However, information marketers also create software products, or have them created for them. You can hold teleseminars or offer an online course. The key to being a successful information marketer is finding a topic you’re passionate about and researching supply and demand. There are tons of niches just waiting for a motivated entrepreneur.

#3 Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketers earn a commission on products or services they sell. Generally, affiliate marketers create a website around a niche topic. They use content to build an audience and drive traffic to their website. In their content they promote, review, and link to the sales pages of the products or services they represent.

For example, a person could create a website around pet health and be an affiliate for companies that provide products and services that support pet health. Affiliate marketing can be a very lucrative home based business. Like information marketing the key is to find a niche you’re passionate about and to research supply and demand. You’ll also want to research affiliate products and services.

Other ways to start a home business include direct sales, selling a product, coaching and membership sites. There are a number of ways to make a living from home. Find the business model that’s right for you and enjoy!

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How to Start Your Own Ebook Business With PLR

by BlondieWrites on April 10, 2010

How to Start Your Own Ebook Business With PLR

I recently signed up for the NakedPLR.com membership site created by Jeremy Burns the undisputed King of PLR.

This review is going to break down exactly what NakedPLR.com is all about and what you might expect when you check out the inside (if you decide to do so).

Go to NakedPLR.com now by clicking here.

First off, we’ll start with a description of exactly what the NakedPLR.com site really is. It’s tagged as a site that gives you 4-5 new private label rights products each and every month. These are eBooks on niches that have been researched and are hot topics.

One thing I found that was ridiculous was the price. In a time where “quality” private label rights products cost $50-$70 EACH on the low end, NakedPLR.com comes in at a stunningly low $19.97 a month for ALL 5 products which is refreshing! The $19.97 price is only for a limited time… the regular price is $47 a month.

You get ALL past PLR products for a limited time when you join now. Ad of this writing, that’s over 90!

Here’s what in the site with a more specific break down of each section…

NakedPLR’s

This is the section that you’ll go to in order to get access to the current months private label rights products. Each product comes with two documents called the Product Analysis and Fast Action Ideas documents.

These documents contain copy starters to help you create an awesome sales letter for your new eBook as well as keywords and competitive pay per click analysis so that you can start bidding on keywords to get traffic to your website quickly.

You’ll also find market research, potential titles for your product and much more.

Also included are 25 articles for each of the products that you can use to further customize your book, use for article marketing or use for creating reports or other traffic generating materials.

PLR Training

This section is definitely the price of the website. Most membership sites that say that they are going to offer training fall so short of delivering on the promise that it isn’t even funny.

Believe me, I’m a member of several monthly websites and the offering as far as fresh training is sparse.

So far, there have been incredible amounts of training resources and tools added to the member’s area of NakedPLR.com that are of extremely high value. There are over a half dozen manuals and quick start guides that show you everything from how to customize your books each month all the way to making more money from them, multiplying profits and getting cheaper pay per click traffic.

The information included in this training section easily could have been sold as a multiple hundred dollar physical course but Jeremy has included it all in the members area.

I honestly feel that this one section alone is worth every penny of the membership fee each month.

Site Builder

This section gives you everything that you need to build a hot selling website that you can use to start selling your products.

You get a complete course that takes you through the entire process of using the two documents that come with each product to craft your own sales letter step by step, without writing anything from scratch!

This course is around 100 meaty pages long and could easily be a $97 sales letter customization course all by itself.

Best of all, you also get a sales letter template that aids you in the process with more guidance and the formatting already done for you!

You see people selling sales letter software that doesn’t offer the results this template does for upwards of $200 or more but it’s included in your NakedPLR.com membership.

Bonus PLR’s

This section is loaded with over a dozen products with rights that you can use to start selling right away for immediate profits.

Most of these products come complete with sales letters and graphics and are ready to roll.

The cool thing is that you can use some of the tactics that you’ve learned in the training material provided in the training section and further customize these existing products.

This allows you to create a product fast that’s totally unique to you!

Chances are, you’ve probably seen some vendors selling these products that you’re going to get for free *with* rights.

Download them, use the information in them to profit from and also use them to sell for a profit.

Affiliate Cash

Obviously this section gives you information on promoting NakedPLR.com through the affiliate program.

This section is 100% different from any of the other affiliate programs that you may have been exposed to online.

In addition to information on how to get your affiliate links, you actually get a course on how to start promoting your link and generating traffic to it.

The marketing lession given here is great even if you do not use your new knowledge to promote NakedPLR.com.

There are even web 2.0 tactics covered that you’ve seen in many paid courses as well as tools such as press releases, articles and review for your blogs.

Best of all, even if you don’t have a website you can use this information to start generating traffic to your NakedPLR.com affiliate URL and start generating recurring income for yourself using completely free methods!

You could even use the tactics that you learn in the affiliate marketing training to apply to all of your NakedPLR.com products you get every month for fast (and free) traffic.

As you can probably tell, I am very happy with all of the goodies that I receive as a NakedPLR.com member.

Of course, the star is the 4-5 products you get every month with private label rights enabling you to start 4-5 new niche businesses each month but the training, bonus products, tools and affiliate training are also awesome.

Overall, I give the NakedPLR.com membership two thumbs up and I recommend that you take a look at grabbing your own membership. You definitely won’t regret it.

If you are lucky you will still find there are still memberships left at Jeremy’s NakedPLR site. I know they are close to filling all the spots.

Go to NakedPLR.com now by clicking here.

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How to Make Money With Your Own Virtual Assistant Business

by BlondieWrites on April 10, 2010

How to Make Money With Your Own Virtual Assistant Business

So you want to start your own virtual assistant business. Great! I assume you want to start your own VA business not only to own your own business, but also to make money. More and more businesses are outsourcing and paying VA’s, and there is no reason why you can’t be one of them.

You’ve got your business name, all the office equipment you need, and you’ve got the determination to make your business a success. So now the big question is, how do you go about finding clients?

What Type of Services Will You Provide?

We all have certain areas where our talents and interests lie. You have so many choices as to what areas you want to special in. There’s a good chance you already have experience in some of the specialty areas. Maybe you don’t even realize all of the areas VA’s are working in.

Here’s just a small sampling of the services you could offer:

Administration
Writing services (technical or creative)
Proofreading and editing, research (online or traditional)
Scheduling
Bill paying
Simple website design
Newsletter distribution
Reminder services
Event planning
Concierge services
Research
Data processing/data management
Desktop publishing
Transcription services
Mail and email services
Telephone/fax services
Internet services
Bookkeeping
Purchasing services
Marketing services
Personal services

Once you know the types of services you are going to offer, it’s time to find you some clients.

What to Charge

It isn’t too hard to figure out what to charge. Start by contacting local support service businesses in your area. Ask them if they can send you a price list. Get several of these to learn what everyone else is charging. You don’t want to charge too much and you don’t want to under price yourself so you look like you don’t do great work. Find the happy medium and go with that amount. Prices are not set in stone. If you have to change your prices down the road, so be it.

Get Some Business Cards

If you want to look professional, make sure you get your business cards right away. You never know when you might meet someone who needs the services you’re offering. When that time comes, all you need to do is pull out your card and hand it to them. Never be without your business cards!

Here are some great sites where you can get business cards from free to as low as $10 for 250 cards.

(Click on FREE business cards – Professional business cards free)

100 Free Business Cards at OvernightPrints.com!

250 Free Business Cards + 2 Free Upgrades. Get FREE Glossy Finish & FREE Backside upgrades with your order.

250 FREE Business Cards – Get your FREE Cards today!

Tell Your Circle of Friends and Family About Your Business

Since you already have a relationship with your family and friends, don’t forget to tell them about your new VA business. While your brother might not need your services, there’s a good chance that he might know someone who does. You can start networking right away with those you already know.

Think about designing a letter or oversized postcard about your service and send it to everyone you know. Maybe even include a picture of yourself, the name of your business, the services you offer and ask that if they can’t use your service, to please recommend your business to others who might.If you send a letter, include a couple of your business cards for passing on to your possible clients.

Send Out Press Releases

A press release is a great way to start your business off with a bang. I want to mention here though that a press release is not something you just send out when you open your business. I’ll talk more about this a little later.

Here is a sample of a press release template:

http://www.press-release-writing.com/press-release-template.htm

Where to send your press releases:

Local Newspapers
Local Business Publications
Local Radio Talk Shows
Local TV News Stations

PrWeb is a free online site that you can use to send out press releases and you can pick what area you want your press release to be distributed to.

Other reasons to send out a press release:

  • You’re offering a new service
  • Launching a website for your business
  • You’ve won a high profile client account or contract
  • You’ve had an unusual challenge or adversity and
    overcome it; especially when others thought it couldn’t be done.
  • You participate in a fundraising event or you are to
    serve in a charitable organization.
  • You’re offering or sponsoring a workshop, seminar, or conference
  • If you’re changing the company name, location, web
    address, or product name

I’m The Answer to Your Problem

Convincing your future clients that they should hire you might seem a little scary at first. But once you build more clients, and they start telling you what a godsend you are, your confidence level is going to soar.

Here are some convincing ideas to consider…

Tell your future client why they need you. Maybe you work odd hours, or you have very reasonable rates. Go over the services you offer and why you are so good at what you do.

Explain to the client what skills you possess, your background, and your education.

You can help your client catch-up on a backlog of work that other employees aren’t able to get to.

You offer reduced costs and expenses for your client. They don’t have to pay you benefits or sick time.

You will help their business grow with your marketing techniques.

Thanks to the technology that is currently available, using your services will save the client money. Explain that you reduce overhead. They only pay you for work completed. They aren’t paying someone if there is no work to do. Plus your client doesn’t have to pay for sick or holiday time, or for health benefits.

It won’t be long until you’re confidence, strong and bright, shines through. You won’t have any problems explaining to a future client that you are the right person for the job, or that you are the solution to their problems.

So What Are You Waiting For?

Making money in a virtual assistant business can be done. Full time VA’s are making about $38.000 a year. This year, why can’t that VA be you?

For more information about this business visit: Bizymoms.com

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