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Home Based Business

More and more people today have been setting up their own businesses and learning about marketing small businesses online. Times have changed since the advent of the internet and there are a few elements to any successful marketing campaign that I’ll share with you here.

Web Presence

The point of marketing small businesses online is to drive traffic to your site and hopefully make a few conversions. A conversion rate calculates how many people must visit your site before you make a sale or generate a new lead. The following methods are each valuable methods of increasing your web presence.

Top Five Methods

1. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the single most important element to any online marketing campaign. By optimizing your site for search engine crawlers, you can improve your ranking in those search engines and generate long term organic web traffic.

2. Search engine PPC (pay per click) advertising is another way you can increase your presence. You set up your account with the search engines, choose your keywords and determine which sites you want your ad displayed. For everyone who clicks on one of your ads and lands on your site, you are charged for that. If no one clicks, you owe nothing.

3. Social networking is quickly becoming an amazingly powerful marketing tool. Setting up free accounts on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and HubPages you can start promoting yourself and your products. Include social bookmarking buttons on each of your web pages to encourage others to spread the news.

4. Article marketing campaigns in another excellent way to improve your web presence. By submitting good quality and informative articles to directories such as EzineArticles, you are not only presenting yourself as an expert to human readers, you are also creating valuable backlinks to your site which can greatly improve your ranking.

5. Commenting on blogs, forums and discussion groups is another powerful method of increasing your presence. Leave regular comments on sites that are related to your market’s niche. Doing this will also create valuable backlinks.

It Takes Time

Marketing small businesses on the internet takes patience and dedication. There is not overnight success, not even online. Be prepared to spend time each day building on each of the five principles. Keep at it and before long you’ll be reaping the rewards.

Everyone dreams about leaving the daily grind and their nine to five jobs behind in favor of a home bases online business. You may be one of the many who is thinking about this day in and day out, but the problem lies in knowing how to get started. Before you can have a successful online business you do in fact have to start one and knowing the process of doing so will help you realize your eventual dream of being self-employed.

There are number of steps that should be taken in order to start your home business online. Here are some steps you will need to complete in order to get your business rolling:

1. Decide what you want to do: How do you propose to make a living online? While there are many avenues that you can take you must first decide what you will do in order to know where to go. For example, if you decide you are going to start a business selling items online you need to decide whether or not you will have a website to sell your items, sell on eBay, or do a combination of both. But again, you need to first determine your plan for a business.

2. Decide to incorporate or not: Depending on the business you set up you may want to incorporate as a C Corp or an S Corp. Then again you may want to stay as a sole proprietor. Whatever you decide, you do have to pick something. The best thing to do when making this decision is to make an appointment with your accountant and have them explain to you the pros and cons for each in regards to the business you are planning on opening up online.

3. Find out about licensing: With whatever business you decide to do online you will more than likely at least need to obtain an occupational license. Furthermore you may have to get licenses specific to your state or even your county and city. There may even be additional licenses that are required by the industry in which you will be participating in accordance to the law. The point is you need to find out what licenses you will have to obtain in order to do legitimate business online.

4. Promote Yourself: The last step in staring your home business online is to promote yourself and let it be known by all that you are coming out of the gates with thunder. It isn’t enough to just have a plan, but you also need to let others know that you are out there and let them know exactly what it is that you will have to offer them.

While working for yourself is probably the most rewarding job of all, if not started properly you can be in for a big disappointment. By taking the appropriate steps to start the business off the right way you too can be up and running with a home business conducted online that will allow you to leave the rat race far in your rear view mirror.

Imagine this is what will happen to you the next day. You are going to give a presentation to a group of people whom you have not met before. The presentation topic is something you are familiar with because this is not the first time you present this topic. As a result, you believe that you can do a good job to deliver this topic smoothly to your participants. On the day of your presentation, unexpected events happened. You have unconsciously used a wrong phrase to explain a concept and you participants spotted your mistake. You have just discovered a typographical error on one of your slides. You were challenged by one of your participants who disagreed with a point you made in your presentation. How would you react to these unexpected events?

Here is the truth. In all presentations, always expect the unexpected. If you were hesitant, your confidence level would go down immediately and this could affect the flow of your presentation. The question is what you could have done to maintain your confidence level notwithstanding these unexpected events. In this article, I am going to share with you 4 tips that could help you to exhibit your confidence when giving a presentation.

Dress appropriately

As a speaker and trainer, I do presentation on different topics, for example, tax training and personal development training. I have my own dress code for different types of training.

In my tax training, most participants will be working professionals. Hence, I will put on my business suit to make me look professional. This is always my way of building rapport with this group of participants and raising my credibility.

When it comes to my personal development training, I will dress differently. The reason is that my participants can come from all walks of life and it does not make sense to wear business suit. Instead, I tend to wear black shirt because studies have shown that black colour signals power and authority. Whenever I am in black, I feel strong and unstoppable, and this helps to boost my confidence level and prepare for the unexpected events during my presentation.

State clearly your purpose

Have you come across with speakers who are experts in their relevant fields but do not look confident when giving presentation? Based on my own research, I discovered a secret. That is, they do not have a clear purpose of giving the presentation. There is a saying that “the bigger the why, the easier the how”. What this means is that we must know why we are giving the presentation before doing it.

Here is what I do for my presentation. I will write down my purpose of giving that presentation. I will put myself into the shoes of the participants and ask this question – “Why should I listen to you?” Very often, what I have written down becomes part of the introduction of my presentation and this is another powerful technique of building rapport with my participants and maintaining my confidence level.

Learn to say “Yes”

I am not sure if you notice that we are surrounded by a lot of negative people and negative thoughts. I was told before that for each positive statement we made, there would be 14 negative statements before and after that. In my presentation, I do my best not to allow any negativity to be present because I know that it will affect my confidence level.

Here is what I do in my training. I encourage my participants to say “Yes” with me whenever opportunity arises. When saying “yes’, say with conviction and make sure that all the people in the training room can feel the positive energy. Positive energy in my view is clearly a booster of my confidence level.

Put on our listening ear

Here is my final tip – to put on our listening ear. As mentioned above, one of the unexpected events is that my participants do not agree with what I said in my presentation. Even though I feel strongly that I am right, I will remain silent and let my participants finish their point. I will listen carefully to what they say and handle the objection tactfully based on my business training. Sometimes it may be useful to handle such objection offline because the longer it drags on, the more negative energy will be built in the training room, resulting in a drop of my confidence level.

I hope you enjoy my sharing. Use these tips if they make sense to you and share with me your success stories in my website. I would love to hear from you.