Your Work at Home Guide

If you want to work at home with your business for the long haul, than it is essential that you get some business cards.  There are several inexpensive ways to do this.

1.  Go to Staples or your local stationary store and purchase a box of blank business cards.   They have plenty of different styles to choose from.  This is how my mother got business cards when she began her real estate company.  Take them home and design your business card on your computer.  Now print them out.  You can laminate them if you think that would make them look better.

2.  Go to Vista Print.  That is where I got all of my business cards.  All you have to do is pay shipping and handling and the prices are great.  I’ve also gotten magnets, postcards, and even a T-shirt all for just the cost of shipping.  I am not an affiliate for them, I am just letting you know about this resource.  There is just one thing to watch out for.  When you make your purchase don’t click anything else.  People have said they ended up signing up for something on accident they didn’t want and it charged their credit card.  I have never had that problem and I feel it is really safe as long as you are not clicking around at things you are unsure of.

Of course if you want to shell out the money you can hire a professional printer to design and print your business cards, but it really isn’t necessary.

Once you have your business cards hand them out every chance you get.   Most restaurants have a bowl you can drop your business card in to to win prizes.  You can also use your business card to place ads in the newspaper’s or on placemats.  Grocery stores have a spot you can pin up your business card.  This wil generate some great traffic for you.  Business cards really are an asset.

If you work online and want to get people to visit your site, a great way is by submitting articles.  You are allowed to have an author box with a link to your site in it.  This looks great to the search engines because you submit your articles to many sites getting a link back.

There are many article submitters to choose from, but I use a free article submitter.  It starts you off with 80 article sites.  You can then add more and delete the ones you don’t like.  Once you have it all set up you can start writing articles and submitting them with ease instead of going to site after site which can take 2 days.  I finished submitting my article in 1 hour.

There is a banner for this free article submitter down the right side of my blog entitled, “100% Free to Work at Home”.  Keep in mind that most article submitters cost $197 and up.  Why spend that kind of money if you don’t have to and you can get the same results.

Traffic Exchanges are a powerful tool if used correctly. They can also increase the amount of visits to your site which increases your page rank. This really isn’t too important unless you are a blogger who wants to get paid to write reviews of certain other sites.

When you sign up for traffic exchanges you get to give them a url that you want other people to see. This is all done free. Then you must look at other people’s sites in order to earn clicks to use to allow people to view your site. The ratio is usually 1:3 meaning for every three sites that you view, your site will be shown once. This may sound like a daunting task, but there are some tricks you can use.

If you don’t already use FireFox than you need to get it. You have the ability to open up several tabs at once. About 7 tabs is all you should do at one time. That way you can surf 7 sites at once. Do this for about 1 hour per day. When those 7 sites are going at a steady pace you can add 7 more to do for the next day. My mentor has 7 different ones he does each day of the week. He has them saved as a group and just uploads the ones he needs for that day.

Traffic Exchanges really are a powerful tool and should  be a part of every website/blog owners advertising campaign.

Stat Counter is a cool free site that allows you to place a tracking device on your website or blog.  It is totally free and extremely helpful for many reasons.  The biggest reason being that you will be able to identify which advertising campaigns are working and which ones are duds.

The stat counter can be added to your site in minutes.  It can be visible or invisible whichever you chose.  I’d go with invisible because it is more professional.  Then all your stats are tracked.  You can find out how many people visited your site, where they came from, and how long they stayed on your site.

When I sign up for a safelist, I want to know that what they promised me is true.  I send the safelist to a site that I have stat counter installed on.  If I get results I will see a bunch of urls coming from that safelist company.  If I don’t see any than I know that site is a scam.

You should really consider using this free tool if you don’t already have it.  It’s a great way to track your progress and like I said keep you from spending time on sites that aren’t helping to increase your traffic.

Just visit statcounter.com and follow the instruction.

Best Wishes,

Alicia

One of little known secrets to getting some great search engine traffic is to create a Hub Page.  Hub pages are the same as a web page, but much less complicated to create than a website webpage which requires you to know html.

There is a 13 page guide you will receive when you sign up (sign up is free) that explains exactly what you can do with your hub page.  There are people making hundreds and thousands per month creating hub pages.

You can earn with Google Adsense, Ebay, and Amazon.com.  Hub pages allows you to place these three things on your Web Page.

The key is to make each page as detailed as possible.  For example you don’t want your page to be on “Cats”, but rather “How to de-flea a Cat”.  The more specific, the better search engine traffic you are going to get.

So if you already have a product or service that you provide, create a hub page about it and bring in some natural search engine traffic.

It’s easy to concentrate on earning an extra income online.  We tend to forget that there are plenty of resources offline that we could be using to advertise.  Some of them are really inexpensive too.

The first place I suggest is Vista Print.  You can get tons of products free if you just pay the shipping and handling.  These are quality products.  I order their postcards most often.  Whenever I get junk mail I use the person’s name and address and place it on one of my post cards and mail it out.  They are prime targets because they already know how to use offline advertising.  You can get many more things from Vista Print like, magnets, T-shirts, letterhead, etc.

Use your local papers too.  My Dad owns a newspaper so I have an ad in there, but we also have a great local paper that doesn’t contain any news.  It’s just for people offering things for sale, or people who are looking to buy a certain item, you get the idea.  Advertising in that paper is cheap and almost the whole county reads it.

Another idea is to create some flyer’s and pay some kids to hand them out in mall parking lots or on boardwalks.   Kid’s will do it really cheap and people respond better to kids who are handing out flyer’s than they do to adults.  Must be the cute faces.

My point is that there are plenty of ways you can advertise offline and you shouldn’t discount them.  They can bring you just as much traffic as an online source if you play your cards right.

If you are promoting a business or opportunity that is wide spread you need something to make you stand above the rest.  Offering free bonuses will make the searcher choose you over someone else.

I saw considering getting a site with Site Build It.  As I was searching this I found a guy who was offerings something like 15 free e-books.  If I was going to sign up, I would do it with him so I could get something extra.

There are many places you can find free e-books if you just type “free e-books” in to your search engine.  Sometimes you have to sign up to the e-book yourself and then they give you a reseller link.  Even if it is free it is still called a reseller link.

So try offering some extra free bonuses for your sign-ups and see if you start getting an increase in subscribers.

When working from home it is necessary to have some free email accounts that you can use to sign up for some sites with.  Get Paid to Sites for one and Free Advertising places for another.  I prefer to use Yahoo for these, but many sites don’t allow you to use Yahoo any more because they found out all of their messages to you were going in the bulk email folder (spam folder).

Gmail is better at filtering spam than Yahoo so if you are not allowed to use a free Yahoo account than use a free Gmail account.  Once you have one set up (it only takes 3 minutes) you can sign up for your GPT sites and advertising sites.  Then just check your free email account once per week to delete all the unwanted messages.

Trust me on this.  If you don’t have a specific email for certain sites your regular email address is going to become so bombarded with SPAM you will not be able to use it anymore.  I have a friend who uses 15 email address.  I myself have 7.

One of the best free ways to bring traffic to your blog or website is by using forums.  Forums allow each member to create a signature.  You can insert your blog or website address and make it clickable.  Now each time you make a forum post, your signature is displayed.  It stays there so you can potentially get traffic from it forever.

Using a keyword when creating your forum post is essential for search engine traffic to come from it.  For example my website address is homebusinessesthatprofit dot come, but I make this keyword phrase clickable to readers, “Legitimate Home Based Businesses”.  The more posts I make with that keyword phrase the better my chances are to get search engine traffic from it.

Make sure you post to forums that are in your niche.  That makes your clicks highly targeted and more likely to end up in a sale.

One warning: Don’t spam any of the forums.  You want a good reputation and if you think people won’t remember you from forum to forum you are wrong.  Only ask questions you really want to know the answers too and answer questions you really have some information to contribute.  When people see you are knowledgeable in a subject area they will want to click on your signature.

Hello friends,

What is most essential to any online business? Leads and Traffic! What if I told you, you could get your leads for free. This is an excellent way to promote your business and cost effective too.

For free you can get 500 free leads per month. If you want to tell others about this site you can get a promotion and earn more free leads. These leads come with all the information you would need to make contact and plenty even include their phone numbers if you prefer telemarketing.

Check out this really cool website that just launched. You are going to love it.

Please visit the following link:

Free Leads.net

See you soon!

Alicia Bodine