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A LOT OF PEOPLE DREAM OF OWNING THEIR OWN HOME-BASED BUSINESS.

They dream of setting their own hours, working when they want to work and with whom. The reality is that very few of these people ever take the time to ensure that they have the right skill set - the right tools - to make the leap to a home-based enterprise.

In Solopod No.4 we look at a few simple things you can do to ensure you’re always moving forward with your online business.

All the best,

Dave.

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Written transcript from Solopod 4

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 Solopod 4 [6:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Copyright © 2006 Joe Stec
TAKING A NEW OR EXISTING BUSINESS TO THE INTERNET is not easy. It requires a lot of hard work, patience, and even a little luck to make it work successfully. Here are a few tips to help get you started down the right path:

1. Get the right domain name. - Your domain name is one of the first major factors to consider when you decide to take your business to the web. You want something easy for your customers to remember and find, something sharp, and something that conveys the overall appeal and approach of your business. A good domain name is short, preferably less than 10 or so characters at most, easy to spell, and creates a strong brand image in the minds of your potential customers. Keep in mind that while sites like Monster.com and Google.com etc have great, memorable domain names, names like these are a lot more difficult to brand without substantial market saturation. You will have to work a lot harder to build and maintain your brand if you call your carpentry business “zamopow.com” than if you simply call it “johnscarpentry.com.” Both approaches can work, but ultimately it is up to you to decide what is the best approach for your particular company.

2. Get the right web host. - Competition in the web hosting business is fierce. Hosting companies have come to accept razor thin profit margins in order to offer the cheapest service possible and undercut their competitors. It doesn’t take much to figure out what happens to quality and service as a result. This may be perfectly ok for the average Joe who wants a website with a few family photos on it, but for a professional and reliable web presence, you will need a professional web hosting provider. There are a variety of things you should expect from your web host to ensure that your website isn’t “here today, gone tomorrow.” First things first, make sure they have a 99.9% uptime guarantee. 99.9% is the number to shoot for. It CANNOT be 100%, and any service that promises this is taking you for a ride. The reason for this is that servers need maintenance, and they need to be updated from time to time. A 99.9% uptime guarantee from the hosting provider means that your website will not cut out for hours or even days at a time and cost you valuable business. Also very important is the service team of the hosting provider. Do yourself a favor and call or email them BEFORE you even make a purchase. See what they are like. Poke their brains, ask a few questions. See how fast it takes them to respond (for email), and how well they answer the questions asked. Believe me, you don’t want to get stuck on the wrong side of the contract with this one.

3. Market to your customers, not the search engines. - I know a lot of you will start to moan and groan about this. Search engine rankings seem to be king in today’s excessively competitive online market place. Everyone is gunning for that Top 10 ranking on Google or Yahoo. Companies dish out millions of dollars for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services, and seek to create a robotic website that surfs the tides of the vast ocean of search results. You can do this without freaking out about the minutia of your website. Start producing content! Write informative pieces and include them on your website, start a blog, churn out information that people want to read. Google (plus the rest of the pack) places high value on frequent, unique content production. So as people come to read all this great information you are providing, your ranking with the search engines is increasing, AND your product/service and brand is being marketed. Yes, still optimize for the crawlers, but relax! Produce content, gain a readership. Books upon books can be written on this, but for the sake of brevity I will move on to my next topic.

4. Find a niche. - This ties in with tip #3. It’s all about the niche. You need to find a cozy little spot on the web that’s just yours. This can be a daunting task, especially for businesses in highly competitive sectors. It can be done, however, for any product or service. Understand the target audience for your product or service, and tailor the entire structure of your web presence to fully engage that audience. Keep a watch on your competition, and keep your company one step ahead of the pack. You don’t always have to undercut and bully the competition to get sales, and that’s the beauty of niche-based marketing. Stay focused on your audience, and stay focused on what it is that your company does. Quality targeted traffic and leads are key.

5. Design a compelling website. - Let’s face it, everybody and their brother thinks they are a web designer. The key to having a successful and compelling website has nothing to do with how many flash animations you have, how many keywords you can string together in a sentence, or how sophisticated your backend is. Put yourself in the shoes of the customer, and design a website that you yourself would love to visit. Make each page a logical progression from one to the next, and organize everything in a clean and precise manner. The customer only knows what you tell him and what you show him, so make this communication as efficient as possible. Keep everything relevant, and don’t try to cram the kitchen sink into each page. Space it out, keep it manageable, and keep it engaging.

On a closing note, I hope you learned a little from this article. The web can be a land of ample opportunity and prosperity if you play your cards right. Be patient, and remember that you need to build a solid foundation before you can build the house. The first six months of any website are by far the hardest. In fact, just to get a single sale sometimes seams like an impossible task! Persevere, and success will follow.

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Article by Joe Stec of Monster Web Online (http://www.monsterwebonline.com) - Monster Web is one of the premier hosting and web service providers for small and start-up businesses.

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P.S. A great place to start building your online business is with Site Build It!. You can download a complete library of free ebooks and resources here. Also, check out the Reference Center on this site for a whole host of tips and techniques that will help ease your path to Internet Business Success!

All the best,

Dave.

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NOW I KNOW YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT BLOGS…

You should have, you’re reading (and listening) to one now, and we’ve talked about blogs enough this past few posts. But what about a vlog, or a wiki, how about a pod?

In Solopod 3 we find out what these weird new terms mean to us as solo online entrepreneurs.

We also think about how your own success in life has nothing to do with luck, breeding or super-intelligence. It’s down to you making a simple choice.

All the best,

Dave.

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Written transcript from Solopod 3

(more…)

 

 Solopod 3 [10:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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THE WAY YOU FEEL ABOUT YOURSELF, your self-esteem, drives your thoughts. These thoughts transform into actions. The actions that you take are the key factors in getting what you want out of life. If you are not achieving your goals, take some time and evaluate how you feel about yourself.

Achieving your goals takes repeated action and you can’t give up too early. High self-esteem can give you the drive, determination, and personal power necessary to take these actions and be persistent until you achieve success.

However, if you are constantly critical of yourself, then these feelings will lower your self-esteem. If you have low self-esteem, then it will be more difficult to take the right actions to enable you to achieve your goals. This link between thoughts and actions is what keeps you from getting started or what causes you to give up.

So what can you do to conquer self-doubt and energize your actions? It all starts with positive thinking. Start off by spending some time congratulating yourself for what you have already accomplished in life.

Everyone has had their share of wins. Make a list of these accomplishments and what actions you took to make them happen. Think about the obstacles that you overcame or what special actions you took to reach each goal. This is a great way to acknowledge your successes and give your self-confidence a boost. Your list of wins will be the foundation that you build on for your future successes.

Remember that there is a link between thoughts and actions. It’s time to take control of your thoughts. Whenever you start having doubts, pull out your list.

Negative thoughts are the greatest dream killer known to mankind! Telling yourself “I can’t” will lower your self-esteem, reduce the effectiveness of any actions that you take, and prevent you from achieving your goals. Your list of wins is something that can reassure you whenever negative thinking tries to take over your mind.

Instead, tell yourself “I can”. Positive thoughts bring confidence, optimism, and focused action which give you a much better chance of achieving your goals. “I can” is a great way to plant seeds in your mind for positive thoughts. The resulting high self-esteem will provide the extra edge that you need to drive away your fears and eliminate any doubt that keeps you from accomplishing your goals.
All the best,

Dave.

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YES, THIS IS SLIGHTLY MORE SALES-ORIENTED THAN USUAL BUT, following Angela Booth’s great article about the five business models you can use to turn your blog into a six-figure earner, I’ve been doing a bit of research and have discovered that no other than Derek Gehl and the good folks at The Internet Marketing Center have released a brand new video and printed guide to Blogging For Dollars as the result of a year-long study into the blogging phenomenon.

Product Review:

“Blogging For Dollars” By Derek Gehl and The Internet Marketing Center

While going through Derek Gehl’s new “Blogging For Dollars” system, I was amazed just how powerful blogs really are. The amount of traffic you can drive to your website with a blog is impressive!

If you don’t have a blog yet, NOW is definitely the time to start one!

And if you want to turn that blog into a huge success, Derek and his team have invested over $79,583.28 in developing and testing his new system, “Blogging For Dollars,” and…

… Their test results were truly shocking!

Some of Derek’s clients and members of his team were scooping up handfuls of #1 rankings in the search engines — for HIGHLY competitive terms — without hiring an expensive SEO specialist.

And I’m positive that anyone can secure a top 10 position in the search engines using the advanced blogging techniques explained in this system!

Plus, by having a blog, you can drive swarms of traffic to your website, explode your sales and profits…

… OR add new streams of revenue to your existing business!

But, what I like most about this system is that it’s for both advanced users and it’s totally newbie friendly at the same time.

In fact, “Blogging For Dollars” lays out a simple plan for starting your very FIRST online business using blogs, and teaches you how to set up your FIRST blog in 45 seconds… 5 minutes if you’re slow!

Here’s a tiny sample of what you’ll learn:

* How to use blogs to dramatically increase your website traffic — and add 1,000’s of EXTRA dollars to your bottom line!

* How to rank #1 in Google, Yahoo!, and MSN — for the keywords MOST searched by your target audience!

* How Derek’s team pushed a webpage to a #2 ranking in Google for a highly competitive keyphrase — with less than 60 minutes’ effort! (And why we saw traffic and sales results in less than 14 days!)

* Which 3 critical steps you MUST follow to catapult your website to the TOP of the search engine rankings — for any keyword you choose!

* How to Attract 400% more repeat traffic than your static webpage! Since blogs take just seconds to update (from ANYWHERE in the world), it’s easy to draw visitors back again and again with fresh news and postings!

… And MUCH more!

And since blogging is the biggest trend to hit the Internet in the last 10 years, there’s more opportunity to profit from it right now than there ever will be. My prediction is we won’t see another chance like this for at least another 10 years… Which means the time to act is now!

If you want to get in on the action, and maximize your blogging profits quickly, then I highly recommend you take a look Derek Gehl’s new system right away.

“Blogging For Dollars” comes with a 96-minute instructional DVD, and an easy-to-follow guidebook containing 115 pages of every single detailed technique and strategy for generating MASSIVE profits from any blog!

Click here to get more details on the system that can help you take advantage of this incredible opportunity… Before it’s too late!

All the best,

Dave.

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