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A Home-Based Business Online Issue 98 : September 3 Sent to 9,802 Opt-In Subscribers Editor: Elena Fawkner Publisher: AHBBO Publishing http://www.ahbbo.com Contact By Email IN THIS ISSUE 1. Welcome and Update from Elena 2. Home-Based Business Idea of the Week - Packing/ Unpacking Service 3. Feature Article - Give 'em What They Want 4. E-Book of the Week 5. Subscription Management 7. Contact Information 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! First, another reminder about full mailboxes. I have deleted over 1,000 email addresses over the past couple of weeks due to subscribers with free email accounts allowing their mailboxes to become full. I know of a number of publishers who refuse to accept subscribers with hotmail.com and yahoo.com addresses for this very reason. For now, I am continuing to send to these addresses but if I send you an email that bounces because of a full mailbox, your address will be zapped. If you want to continue receiving AHBBO, please clear out your mailbox on a regular basis. This week's article is about choosing the right subject matter for your information product. I don't know about you but I'm fed up to the back teeth with e-books on Internet Marketing. Honestly, how many ways can you say the same thing? The subject's been done to death. Enough already. I hope this week's article will inspire original thought and original content creation! As always, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this week's issue. Remember, this ezine 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 - Packing/Unpacking Service Are you an organizer by nature? One of those "everything has its place and everything in its place" types? If so, have you thought about offering a packing/unpacking service for residential moves? This is a service in high demand by busy professionals who can't afford to take time off work to move. Here's how the business would work. Plan to offer a 2 day full service. On day 1 you pack up, on day 2 you coordinate the move and unpack. The idea is that, on moving day, your client comes home from work at the end of the day to find everything unpacked, put away, plugged in and the house generally ready to live in (including made beds). Of course, your client may not require a full service. They may only want you to unpack and put away and attend to the packing and coordination of the move themselves. So structure your pricing based on the level of service required. At the outset, you should schedule an in-home obligation-free consultation with your potential client and discuss the services you offer. Once you have ascertained the level of service required by the client clearly explain your fee structure. As a rough guide, plan to charge an unpacking fee of $10-$15 per box. For a 1-2 bedroom home, anticipate 30-50 boxes, for 3-4 bedrooms 50-100 boxes. If you are also going to be packing the boxes, strike a dollar rate per box. If you are also going to be coordinating the move (greeting the removalists, ensuring furniture and boxes are delivered to the correct rooms), your time for this service should also be worked into your package price. Alternatively, you may prefer to charge by the hour or strike a price for the whole job upfront. ----- There are many more ideas like this at the AHBBO Home Business Ideas page at free home based business ideas with more being added all the time. ATTENTION AHBBO READERS: Fed up with your current web hosting provider? Tired of paying for service you don't get? At Homeport you're not just another customer, but a business partner. How will you benefit by switching to us? Well let's start with a 20% discount, just type AHBBO into our shopping cart's coupon field. Limited time! 3. Feature Article: Give 'em What They Want © 2013 Elena Fawkner People go online for many reasons. Some "surf", just to see what's out there, but most are much more specific in their objectives. They want to know about something and they turn to the Internet to find what they're looking for. At its most basic level, what is the ONE thing that 99% of all website visitors are looking for? You got it ... information. That's why "information is king" is such a constant refrain, it's why e-books have become such a popular medium for both author and reader (instant sales, instant access) and it's why everyone, ANY one, has the opportunity to make money with their computers. This is not yet another article rehashing the benefits of creating an information product (you know that already, already) and it's not YET another article regurgitating the same old marketing principles (you know you need to get the word out about your information product and there are no end of useful resources out there to tell you exactly how). What this article is about is what your information product should be about. Although it's true that the Internet audience is so vast that virtually any subject matter will have a market, actually finding that market may not be so easy. Or, let's say that you know you can put words together, you have a broad base of experience to draw from or you know you can find out what you need to know about a particular subject in order to write an information product about it. Well, here's something to consider. Instead of following the traditional path of deciding what you're going to write about, writing it and then going about finding people who are interested in reading what you've written, how about researching the market and finding out what people want to read about BEFORE writing an information product to meet that need? The advantage of this approach is that you know your market exists before you start writing, you can find out about your market and what it is they really want to know, meaning you can write a highly relevant information product responsive to that demand and, just as important, as you will see, you know exactly where your market is and how to reach it. Let's start at the beginning. I bought Web Position Gold a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to use it create doorway pages that would rank well with the search engines, drive traffic to my site, yada yada yada. Yeah, so? Well, most uncharacteristically, I decided to follow the instructions. The first step was to "target keywords you think people would type in the search engines to find the type of products or services you offer". Well ... DUH. But, just for the hell of it, and since I was, after all, following The Instructions, I decided to read the "Choosing Keywords" topic "for more information on choosing effective keywords!". Here's an extract: "Target the wrong keywords and all your efforts will be in vain. Choose the right keywords, and you'll see your traffic skyrocket. Therefore, think long and hard on what keywords people are likely to use to find you. ... "The question to ask yourself is how do you really know if you're optimizing your pages for keywords that Web surfers are looking for? There are several good techniques you can apply to determine what people might be searching for ... "However, the best way is to stop guessing and actually SEE what people are searching for." I followed this advice and tried the keyword generator service they recommended (see below for links). Now, remember, at this point all I was trying to do was to come up with a list of keywords relevant to the subject matter of my site that I should target with doorway pages to drive traffic to my site. I signed up for a one-day membership with Word Tracker for something like $6. Amazingly enough, I followed the instructions there too. I ended up with hundreds of potential keywords to target, all of which were actual search terms entered by users over the past 60 days. Although all of the keywords I expected to find were there (and well serviced by my competitors I may add), right there, at the top of the list for each search engine, were some keywords I would NEVER have thought to target and neither, it appeared, had my competitors. Here's the stats (I'm not revealing the keywords themselves for reasons which will become obvious if they're not already): Keyword Number* Competing* #1 238 1 #2 268 14 #3 2,399 184 #4 556 21 * The Number column represents the number of times this particular keyword has been searched for within the past 30 days. The Competing column shows the number of competing sites targeting that keyword. Now, this information is fine and dandy for doorway page creation. Just target the keywords that are highly sought after with relatively low competition (there is a Keyword Effectiveness Index number also provided which "compares the 24 hour result with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for your campaign". The higher the KEI, the more popular the keywords are and the less competition they have), create doorway pages that target these keywords, submit them to the search engines and, assuming your pages are structured to rank well with the particular search engine involved (which is where Web Position Gold comes in), you should be able to get a reasonable ranking. But for me, the true revelation was discovering a subject matter sought by a significant segment of my market but which was largely being ignored by me and my competition. In other words, I had discovered an all-important niche market. The subject matter involved is very specific and narrow. It is a simple matter for me to research this subject and create an information product to meet this demand. Which, of course, I intend to do. And which, of course, is why I'm not telling you what it is! And, once I've created my information product, how do I reach my market? Simple. I use the very same keywords that I know people are entering to find my product, create doorway pages for those keywords and voila! ... a targeted information product to a targeted niche market. My market may not number in the thousands every month, only the hundreds. But of those hundreds, a significant proportion are highly motivated to purchase my product because, as the above analysis shows, they have a need that is currently not being met. What would you rather have, 500 prospective customers, 20% of whom actually buy from you (100 sales) or 5,000 prospective customers, 1% (if that) of whom actually buy from you (50 sales)? Targeting your niche means narrowing your focus, devoting your energies towards a smaller but more highly targeted market. What you lack in terms of sheer numbers of prospects you will more than make up for on your bottom line. So, bringing it all together, start with a broad subject matter that you know something about or that interests you enough that you can acquire the requisite knowledge within a relatively short period of time. Follow the steps that I went through with the keyword generator and see if, like me, you can identify a niche market that is underserviced. If so, create an information product that satisfies that unmet need and promote it by targeting the very same keywords that you used to identify the niche in the first place. Do this and, unlike the millions who have devoted their life's work to writing information products about Internet Marketing, you can actually stand a chance of making a valuable and original contribution to the body of work available on the Internet today and get paid real money for your efforts. ------ Here are the links to the resources I use that will help you if you decide to go this route: Web Position Gold - for creating those all-important doorway pages once you've created your information product: http://www.ahbbo.com/webpositiongold.html . Keyword Generator - for finding underserviced niches to target: http://www.ahbbo.com/wordtracker.html . Make Your Knowledge Sell - an excellent manual for creating your own information product from soup to nuts: http://www.ahbbo.com/myks.html . ------ ** Reprinting of this article is welcome! ** This article may be freely reproduced provided that: (1) you include the following resource box; and (2) you only mail to a 100% opt-in list. (Articles are no longer being made available via autoresponder due to large numbers of bounced mails due to full mailboxes.) Here's the resource box to use if reprinting this article: ------ Elena Fawkner is editor of A Home-Based Business Online ... practical home business ideas for the work-from-home entrepreneur. http://www.ahbbo.com 4. E-Book of the Week Your Own Internet Business - An Overview Brought to you by Joe Robson and Tom Glander of The Newbie Club, this collection of articles about running an online business tells it like it REALLY is. Download for a reality check. ATTENTION AHBBO READERS: FREE Report, "How to Write A Book On Anything in 14 Days or Less! GUARANTEED! Fiction or Non, get an agent in 36 hours, blueprint your entire book in 2-hours, create 'technologies' no one else has, buy a best-selling plot for 75 cents, create a non-stop client magnet, create demand for your book without ever leaving home, get an editor FREE, and much more! http://www.ahbbo.com/writeabook.html 7. Contact Information Elena Fawkner, Editor A Home-Based Business Online Contact By Email http://www.ahbbo.com
** Reprinting of this article is welcome! ** This article may be freely reproduced provided that: (1) you include the following resource box; and (2) you only mail to a 100% opt-in list. Here's the resource box to use if reprinting this article: Elena Fawkner is editor of Home-Based Business Online. Best business ideas and opportunities for your home-based or online business.
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