Articles Related to Work at Home

Section:   Internet Business

 

Work at home business with SFI

 

From the feedback I have so far, it seem that many people wonder what this home base business is about and what exactly they have to do.   In other words a job description would clear things up.  Well, so far I think that it is well explained what multi level marketing is.   Hence we should focus on what should be done after someone signs up and becomes an affiliate.  SFI provides everything needed for the job (your website, training, support, informational sites and discussion boards) and what remains to be done is referring people to your website.   Generally it is as simple as it sounds: Refer people to your website.   Questions are asked on how you do this.   Lets see some other methods of promoting a home based business on the Internet.   First we need a way to measure and compare the resources needed to achieve our goal.  The goal is to refer a new personal affiliate (in other words to get a new person to join your group and start working under you).   The resources are personal time, personal work and personal money devoted to this business to achieve this goal.   There are several ways, but before we refer to them we must refer to the basic decision you have to make:

  • You will do it yourself or

  • You will use paid services available on the internet

To be honest, I have chosen to do it myself.   Specifically I chosen to create a website of my own which is constructed in a "search engine friendly" way and contains links to my SFI website.   It is found out that almost 90% of the people that look for something at the internet, use search engines.  On the other hand, search engines rank websites for the order of displaying them.  And the war is about being as near the top as possible.   This is a good method of promoting a website, I refer to it more later on.   Now let's see the methods to do the business, not all of them, but the main ones, the direct ones. (I use the word direct to indicate those methods that have as their goal to bring a new person into the network marketing structure in your group. There are also indirect methods that have as their goal to bring people in touch with you and your network marketing company you make part of, but not ask from them to join. Their scope is to gain the trust of these people to your skills and to the effectiveness of your network marketing structure and bring them into the structure in a second time). Email me indicating one of these methods in your opinion.

One of the direct methods is posting free classified ads on websites that publish free classified ads. You can find a lot of them if you type "free classified ads" (without the quotes), to the search box of a major Search Engine like Google.   I used this method on my early days in network marketing and this way I referred my first affiliates and started building my group. It doesn't cost anything, apart from the telecommunication fees you pay for as long as you are connected to Internet.    It requires a lot of time and a lot of personal work to get an affiliate.   I was posting ads for two hours every day and in return I was getting an affiliate every day. This means 30 possible co-workers every month. Have in mind that it is free to join my network marketing company and start promoting your own business. It is not required from someone to pay anything to become a part of the network marketing structure I work for. I was advertising a free to join business opportunity on the net for two hours every day and in return I was getting one person ready to try.   In my opinion it is very difficult to built a group of affiliates and get a worthy income from it implementing only this method of promoting your business. 

Another method is posting paid classified ads on websites that publish paid classified ads. You can find a lot of them if you type "paid classified ads" or "advertise" or "advertise with us" (without the quotes), to the search box of a major Search Engine like Google.    Also many search engines host paid ads, which appear on the side of the appropriate listings. This means that when someone queries a search engine about "work at home business opportunities", for example, in the side of the results of the query appear paid ads. I never used this method, since it requires a lot of money for a paid ad to appear in a position able to attract a sufficient number of visitors. This method does not require a lot of personal time or work. It requires a lot of personal money to be spent, usually more than 3$ per new affiliate.   

Also you can find web sites about "work at home opportunities", or "home business on the Internet" offered for paid banner of text advertising.   These sites get a lot of visitors every day and they rent space in their home pages (usually in a monthly basis) to marketers interested in advertising their business.  The competition on getting this space is big between the marketers in the Internet. Some times you have to pay more than 200$ to get a good spot in the first page of a high visited website relative to your business. In return you get a lot of well-targeted visitors searching for a profitable and legitimate work at home business on the net. These visitors will convert to affiliates that will cost you no more than 1$ per affiliate.   

Another method to be found on the net is to use Pay per Click (PPC) Search Engines (SE) to promote your business.  I also used this method for more than 6 months. It cost me less than a dollar to get a new affiliate from my listings in Overture, which is the most known PPC SE. I was getting about 20 new affiliates a month and I was paying 20$ a month. I'm sure it will cost you less to refer new affiliates by using other PPC SE, not so known but also less expensive. But you will be getting less than 20 affiliates a month. You cannot build a group with such a number of new affiliates every month, unless you re very good in supporting them and converting them to successful hard-working network marketers.   This method does not require personal work or time. It requires money, as you can understand. The more money you spend. The more affiliates you get.

Another method is to purchase advertising space in electronic newsletters, relative to "network marketing opportunities", "home based business opportunities" or "work at home jobs" etc. These newsletters are send by email to thousands of recipients who explicitly requested to receive them, or at least that is what the publishers of these newsletter claim. These newsletters are published daily, weekly, biweekly or monthly. One of these newsletters is the one you are reading right now. There are newsletters emailed to more than 10,000 subscribers. You have to trust the publisher of such a newsletter, when it says that it is send to thousands of recipients. You also have to pay from 20$ to 200$ for a one time advertisement in such a successful newsletter and most times not at the beginning of it. I'm subscribed to many newsletters. I nearly never read advertisements. I subscribe to these newsletters for the information, so generally I bypass quickly the advertisement spaces to continue reading what interests me.  The effectiveness of this kind of promotion is difficult to be measured. And it is not always standard. I never used this kind of promotion for my business and I do not know its effectiveness or how much it costs to refer an affiliate using it.   As you can understand this method will never exhaust you. It requires the minimum work and time for you (just to find the newsletters to be advertised to and set up the procedure), but you need to spend money to get results. A lot of them.

Another "direct" method to refer new affiliates is to advertise your business by using email lists. You buy a certain number of emails, which contain your promotional message about your business. These emails are send to the members of such email lists, people who opted-in and want to receive emails with content relative to home business opportunities. I also never used this kind of promotion, which I consider the less cost effective. You can find companies who offer to send 2,000,000 emails for 30$ one time fee. Do not trust them. Do not give them your money. Not even the 30$. Usually these 2,000,000 or what so ever emails are send again and again to the same addresses. Addresses that are gathered by special programs, called "email harvesters", who crawl the Internet, jumping from website to website, using the link exchange pages of these websites and collecting every email address they find in these websites. I have 7 email addresses. There are days that I receive the same message in all of them and more than one time. As you can understand you won't get affiliates using this method. It does not require time, or work, or money, but it also does not achieve our goal. If someone of you has used this method with even poor results, any kind of results, please email me informing me about it.  

All of these methods are good, but require too much money or two much effort to obtain a good result, which is to refer a good number of new affiliates.   That is why I decided to use the method, I present you below. A method that will save your time, work or money, if you are in grade to implement it. It is the most cost-effective one. It certainly requires a certain level of familiarity with Internet and your computer and will to learn and work on the Internet.  It is a cheap and effective method. It is the method I prefer.   The method is to design and promote your own website on the Internet in order to get a good ranking in the listings of the major Search Engines.

That is what I have done. And it rewarded me. I receive 5 -10 new affiliates every day from each website I created.   Now I spend less than four hours a week maintaining and promoting this website in order to keep a good rank in the listings of the major Search Engines.   Do you think it is difficult to implement this method?   Well, it is not easy.   If you follow this kind of promotion for your business, you have to learn more about website designing, creating and publishing. It will take sometime to appear in the listings of the major Search Engines. A few months. Three, maybe four.   In the mean time you can  use the other methods of promotion, free or paid. But when this method start to produce results, you will be surprised. It will bring you well targeted affiliates. And it won't cost you much money.

But, really how much does it cost to create and maintain a website on the Internet?   Well depends on the decisions you will take.   Will you register a domain name or use a free name for your website?  Will you host your website in a free Web hosting company or use a free one?  Let's see!  You need to:

  • Register a domain name (domain name is the address someone uses to reach your pages on the Internet, like "www.home-base-business-offer.com" or "www.ibm..com" etc).

  • Find a company offering space to host your pages under your domain name

Domain name registration:   Usually a company, who offers free web hosting services, offers also the opportunity for you to use a free domain name.  An example of such a name is: "www.geocities.com/xxxxxxxxxxx" (where xx...xx could be any sub domain name). In case you decide to use a free domain name and host your website in a free hosting company, this method won't cost you a dollar.   But this is not a wise decision. Not a professional decision. Your visitors, by looking at the URL will understand that you are not a professional. If you do not spend a few dollars a year to have your own domain name and maintain a decent presence on the Internet, why should they trust you their money or join your group?   You have to register your own domain name. Not your physical name, but a meaningful, professional domain name, like "www.home-base-business-offer.com" for example.   Registering your domain name will cost you 20-25$ a year. You can find cheaper services from hundreds of companies on the net offering domain name registration even for 5$ a year. To explain the difference, let me say that It will probably be "use of the domain name" they register and not "registration of the domain name" for you.   And they will probably reserve the right to use your site for their advertising or something else . I use "Great Domainia" to register my domain names.  The registration of the domain name is immediate and the price is fair for the services offered.

Website hosting:   If you register your own domain name, it will be better to find a decent hosting services provider  to host your website.   Paying to host your pages will cost you 5$ - 8$ per month. I use IcdSoft to host my websites. The service is very good, twice that I needed to ask for support, the response time was less than 15 minutes.    As you may already understand, you can find cheaper services. Do not take them in consideration.

So, spending about 100$ a year and 10-15 hours a week can bring to you more than 1500 personal affiliates in the same time period. From this point the situation is in your hands. Will you be able to support them, guide them, motivate them, reward them, help them become successful network marketers?

This method is the most cost-effective as I already mentioned before.   Also implementing it will give a great advantage relatively to other network marketers on the Internet. You will have your own website. By the time and as you will be learning more about network marketing, affiliate marketing and Internet marketing, you will understand that this will be a great weapon in your hands towards the realization of your scope: make money through your home based business on the Internet!

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