Monday, October 19, 2009

Leads, Prospects, Money - Get Your Home Business Going

By Adrian McCluskey

I was asked a while back by a new member of my team what I would do if I was brand new all over again to the online network market or affiliate sales business. What would be my first steps to get up and running?

It's a great question that really got me thinking.

Without a webpage, without a list to market to and without experience, what would I do to get started again?

With those parameters and keeping in mind I have to keep the basics for length, here's what I'd do if starting over again.

Building a prospects list is number one.

There are many ways to do this so here are a few ideas.

If you have the budget and a willingness to learn, the quickest way to build a list is to slap up a quick capture page (use elance.com or other forums to find someone who can build you one cheaply and quickly) offering a free report, (something like "How to Drive Traffic to your Website" (buy a cheap PLR report at plr.com to give away) as an enticement then use pay per click ads on Google, Yahoo and MSN to build a list.

When done correctly, pay per click advertising works quickly and very effectively. Done with little planning or knowledge it can be a frightening money pit. If you plan to use pay per click I absolutely recommend buying a copy of the Perry Marshall guide or one of the others from reputable online trainers that will walk you through step by step on how to set up a PPC campaign. Trying to do it without the knowledge is a recipe for financial disaster.

My budget when I started was small and I quickly wasted it on paid ads that didn't work. From there I started to discover other marketing methods that while they worked a lot slower once up and running were far more effective than paid advertising. Sometimes, slow is good.

Article marketing is often overlooked by today's gurus but you know what it works like a charm (why do think I'm writing this?). Here's a tip to greatly expedite matters. Either write or hire a free lancer off elance.com to write some for you. Post the original article to ezinearticles.com, then take that story and check out uniquearticlewizard.com. It's a monthly subscription of around $70 but it's the best money you'll ever spend. What it will do is mass submit your articles to hundreds of directories all over the web. This give you 100s of back links to your site. If you don't know what this means, don't worry it's all good. This combined with a little keyword research will have your pages ranking at the top of Google in no time.

The reason I think traffic from Google is superior to paid traffic is this. In my experience, visitors to my site from the Google listings are far more motivated than those who got there through paid advertising like pay per click. The paid ad folks obviously cost you money to collect and they buy far less once you get them. Whereas, the people who find you through Google tend to be far more targeted in their wants and therefore more receptive to what you have to offer.

In the next article, I'll get into another way to have your home based business up and off the ground in no time at all.

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