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_______________________________________________________________ IN THIS ISSUE _______________________________________________________________ 1. Welcome and Update from Elena 2. Home-Based Business Idea of the Week - Household Management 3. Feature Article - The Truth About Affiliate Programs 4. Surveys and Trends 5. Success Quotes of the Week
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Home Based Business Information Return to AHBBO Archives
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_______________________________________________________________ 1. Welcome and Update from Elena _______________________________________________________________ Hello again and a warm welcome to all the new subscribers who have joined us since the last issue. The Annual AHBBO 2-for-1 Advertising Sale is now on. Until January 31, kickstart your business for 2017 with double exposure! For every advertising order you place, you receive the same again, absolutely free. To take advantage of this offer, you must place your order before 12 midnight PST, January 31, 2017. See segment 6. for more info or visit . This week's article, "The Truth About Affiliate Programs", was prompted, as so many are these days, by an email I received from a subscriber during the week. Becky asked for advice concerning affiliate programs, wanting to know how to get started by promoting someone else's products before launching her own. Yes, it is yet another debunking article (let's face it -- there's a lot of stuff that NEEDS to be debunked these days!). Those of you busily promoting someone else's program instead of staking out your own claim to Internet turf FIRST may want to slow down for five minutes and see if anything in this article strikes a chord. As always, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this week's issue. Remember, AHBBO is for YOU! If you have comments or suggestions for topics you would like to see addressed, or would just like to share your experiences with other subscribers, I want to hear from you. Please send comments, questions and stories to Contact By Email . _______________________________________________________________ 2. Home-Based Business Idea of the Week - Household Management _______________________________________________________________ You may have heard the expression, "what every working woman needs is a wife". Politically incorrect or not, there is no doubt that working women, indeed, working parents period, especially single working parents, all share one thing in common. They are time poor. They work full-time then spend the rest of their waking hours taking care of children's needs and running a household. There simply isn't any personal time left over. This is where you can come in. Although these people are time poor, many of them are also cash rich. Your household management services business can offer a way for such people to buy the time they need by relieving them of some of the work involved in running a household. This is a very easy business to enter. Entry costs are low and you will be using skills and experience you already possess. The concept of "household management" can be as broad or as narrow as you like. At its broadest it encompasses a wide range of varied activities such as picking up children from daycare or even child minding in the client's home (be sure to check whether there are any licensing requirements in your municipality), grocery shopping, consumer research (what's the most cost- effective new refrigerator or washing machine), running errands and supervising cleaning personnel and other contractors. At its narrowest, you may prefer to confine your activities to only one or two of these activities such as grocery shopping and unpacking. This may be a good way to start with additional services being added over time. Longer term, you will move away from a "hands on" role where you do pretty much everything yourself. Instead, by establishing a database of reliable, reference-checked local cleaners, gardeners, shoppers, contractors and the like you will have a ready bank of competent people to perform whatever tasks your clients require. It should be obvious that a natural progression of this sort of business would lead to the establishment of an agency of sorts with you bringing clients and service providers together. To get started, just place ads in penny savers, distribute flyers in letterboxes in your municipality as well as posting them at the local grocery store. Word of mouth will soon take over. ----- There are many more ideas like this at the AHBBO Home Business Ideas page at free home based business ideas with more being added regularly. _______________________________________________________________ 3. Feature Article: The Truth About Affiliate Programs _______________________________________________________________ © 2017 Elena Fawkner Affiliate programs are a brilliant idea. For the owner of the product, they're a way of recruiting a veritable army of salespeople to promote your product without having to pay them a dime unless and until they generate a sale. For the affiliate, they're a great way of earning extra cash from an existing, high-traffic website with virtually zero additional effort. Only problem is, most affiliates don't HAVE an existing, high-traffic website and they're suckered into thinking that it's a simple matter of signing up for an affiliate program and "driving traffic" to the product owner's site using a uniquely-coded URL. Well, it IS that simple. And it isn't. If you don't already have your own high-traffic website, how do you think you're going to drive traffic to the product owner's site in the hope of generating a sale? Well, there are a few ways, actually. And all of them are going to cost you either time or money. First off, you're going to have to spend money on advertising. How much? Well, consider this. Estimates vary but, roughly, only 2-4% of people who see your ad will actually click on your link. Of that 2-4%, only 1% or so of THEM will go on to buy. In addition, it takes, on average, 7 or 8 exposures to your ad before people will click on it. AND to achieve even these piddly numbers your market must be targeted in the first place. This is, as you can see, nothing but a numbers game. Pure and simple. So what does all this mean to you, the advertiser without a website? Well, to start with you're going to want to advertise where a LOT of people are going to see your ad. But not just ANY people. People interested in the product you're wanting to sell - your target market. So this cuts out the free classifieds and FFAs. And it means you're going to have to spend advertising dollars. Where do you go to advertise then? The most effective form of advertising is in ezines. Take mine, for example. At the time of writing, my subscriber database is around 14,000. Each week I run an ad for my own opportunity (in addition to running ads from other paying advertisers). I generally get about 500 click-throughs over the course of the 2 or 3 days following publication. That's a click-through rate of about 3.6%, about in line with the average. If you were to pay to advertise in my ezine, it would cost you $70 for a single classified based on my $5 CPM ($5 per every 1,000 subscribers) pricing formula. This is not an uncommon formula for pricing ezine advertising. You're therefore paying around 14 cents per click. That's not bad. Other than that, what can you do? Well, you can choose to spend time rather than money. An obvious choice considering what I've just said is to start your OWN ezine. Build your own list and over time you will have a large subscriber database to put your ad in front of too ... and it won't cost you a dime. But this takes time and it takes work. It's taken me two and a half years to build a list of 14,000 subscribers. And it takes a few hours of work to put together the ezine itself including writing the feature article. Every week, week in, week out. Is it worth it? Absolutely. And once you're publishing your own ezine, it's a simple enough matter to distribute your articles for other ezine publishers to run in their ezines. That 4 or 5 liner at the end telling readers who you are with a link to your website (or, if you don't have one, the website of the owner of the product you're selling) is effectively free advertising for you. Not all publishers accept article submissions though, so be sure to find out whether they do before submitting your articles to them. But think about this. If you're doing all this work anyway, doesn't it make sense to create your OWN website (in addition to your ezine)? Sure it takes time and it takes work and it takes money (but not a lot - hosting fees can be pretty cheap if you know where to go). But once it's done and you're just in maintenance mode - adding fresh content every few days, uploading your latest ezine and maintaining your archives - your website does so much of the work for you. Generate a few hundred unique visitors a day and you can be getting the same click- through rate to your affiliate site *for nothing* that you were paying someone else 14 cents a click for. EVERY SINGLE DAY. 24/7/365. So, this is the truth about affiliate programs. They're great if you're the product owner and they're great if you can link to your affiliate site from your own high-traffic site. But if you don't have your own site, you're going to have to buy traffic to your affiliate site - either with money, time or both. How many sales are you going to have to generate to earn enough commission to more than cover your time and costs and leave you with a profit? Bottom line? Setting out to make money with affiliate programs before you have your own site in place is putting the cart before the horse. Yes, you want to make money and you want to do it quickly. But it just doesn't work that way. Not with affiliate programs, anyway. So adjust your expectations and do first steps first. It will be slow going to start. It will take you weeks to create a worthwhile site and then MONTHS to generate the kind of traffic you need. But if you take a long-term approach to your business and take the time now to lay the proper foundation, you'll reap the dividends for years to come. ------ ------ entrepreneur. Free Home Based Business Tips _______________________________________________________________ E-zine Editors... Authors... Information Publishers... Turn An Electronic Newsletter Into a $20,000+ a Month Profit Stream! If you thought publishing ebooks was the next big money making revolution, think again. Monique Harris (of Make Your Knowledge Sell fame) has developed an electronic newsletter publishing formula that's so powerful, she can stop marketing today - not get another paying customer for the next 6 months - and STILL pull anywhere from $10,000 -$20,000 a month. Click here to find out how: _______________________________________________________________ 4. Surveys and Trends _______________________________________________________________ © 2017 Ryanna's Hope ===================== ADVERTISING REALITIES ===================== RIGHT ON WITH THIS ONE! What's the most irritating advertising trend right now? Junk mail disguised to resemble important correspondence, growled 77 percent of readers, stuffing their wastebaskets with papers that look like checks, wedding invitations and bank statements. DOES YOUR CAMPAIGN ALREADY HAVE 2 STRIKES AGAINST YOU? In 1979, some 20 odd years ago, the infamous firm of Oglivy and Mather in NYC surveyed customers and discovered a whopping 75% DID NOT BELIEVE that advertising relayed the "truth" of the products or services. The early 1980's began the "Age of Skepticism" in advertising. (I personally doubt that much of the above percentage has changed.) ============================ CUSTOMERS AND WHAT THEY WANT ============================ THE "BOOMERS" AND KEY MARKETING RECENT SURVEYS... The influential Baby Boomers, currently 77 million strong, are the most lucrative segment in the nation. These individuals, between 34 and 52 years of age, are known for changing every institution they encounter. Prime examples are the classrooms of the 50s and the boardrooms of the 90s. Members of this well-educated, sophisticated, demanding, individualistic, independent, and self-indulgent group has less leisure time than their parents did. Older individuals in this segment are just beginning the battle against aging. Sales of skin cream, suntan lotions, hair coloring, cosmetics, vitamins and nutritional supplements are surging. Spirituality is seeing a rebirth as maturing Boomers search for the meaning of life. Boomers maintain the attitude that they can always take care of themselves. They have become high tech consumers because they can afford it, not because they are more proficient. Memory and nostalgia are useful tools to appeal to Boomers' need for security, but it must be the real thing. ======================== AND THE OTHER 72 MILLION.... ======================== Echo Boomers is the label most often used to describe the next youngest age group segment. These individuals, born between 1977 and 1994, make up 27.5 percent of our population. Also known as Generation Y or the Millenium Generation, these kids are described as more competent, confident and wary than their parents. The 72 million Echo Boomers are diverse in race, living arrangement and socio-economic class. For example, two- thirds are white and one in 35 is mixed race; 23 percent live in poverty and 27 percent have only one parent. They are the first generation to seriously question all traditional racial categories. The teens (age 12 to 19) in this group are very knowledgeable about music, entertainment, fashion and personal care products. They influence the spending of $100 billion per year; $63 billion is their own money. The number of teens in this age range is expected to grow two times the rate of the total population during next 10 years. Echo Boomers are the most media-savvy generation so far. Using celebrities to sell a brand is only marginally effective with this generation. These kids may reject promotions that sell a product or service to a specific gender. Appeals to this group should be designed with the knowledge that teens spend money to have fun - shopping is an experience rather than an errand. These teens understand and value quality; quality is considered the essence of cool. ------ WANT MORE? Ryanna's has published over 45 business articles nationwide for the home entrepreneur. You can obtain free info about their offer of "Cash Making you've Never Seen..." and you can obtain free ebooks and other articles at their site. Subscribe to their free ezine "Surveys and Trends For Entrepreneurs" too! _______________________________________________________________ 5. Success Quotes of the Week _______________________________________________________________ "If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right." -- Henry Ford "We can do anything we want if we stick to it long enough." -- Helen Keller "Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson "Few things are impossible to diligence and skill...Great works are performed, not by strength, but perseverance." -- Samuel Johnson "One only gets to the top rung on the ladder by steadily climbing up one at a time, and suddenly, all sorts of powers, all sorts of abilities which you thought never belonged to you--suddenly become within your own possibility and you think, "Well, I'll have a go, too."" -- Margaret Thatcher _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ 7. Subscription Management _______________________________________________________________ To SUBSCRIBE to this Newsletter:
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