Everybody talks about how great working from home is. Truth is, once you are successful in making a living from home, there’s no going back. Working from home is both satisfying and rewarding.

Of course, there are problems that you must deal with. You have to limit distractions, keep your focus, and replace the interactions in the workplace with other social gatherings.

There are two ways to work from home. You can either work for a company doing the kinds of jobs that are easily outsourced such as call centers, web design, software development, writing, etc.; or you can start your own home based business.

If you’re interested in working for someone else, there are sites available where you can apply for part time or even full time employment with large to small companies looking for outside help. You can find a listing of these sites at workingfromhome-jobs.com.

If you are looking for something as an independent contractor where you do a job such as writing an article, developing a website, or coding some software, you should check out the Digital Point Forums, www.rentacoder.com,  and the many other forums on the web, where you can signup as a writer or coder.

For those with the entrepreneurial spirit, you can run your own business selling your own products, or selling other’s products as an affiliate. There is a lot of money to be made here, but it does require quite a bit of effort to setup.

To smooth the path, and make it much easier to get into the field, I found it advantageous to join some marketing clubs, and forums. Yes they do cost a some money, but I feel that it is the most cost effective way to get the information and skill sets needed.

The first club you should consider is Maverick Money Makers. They have some very good tutorials for beginners, and they will send you a long way on the path to success. I bought into their VIP level so that I could download the material, and have it on my own computer ready for use.

While I do recommend Maverick Money Makers as an excellent learning tool, some of their programs and up sells aren’t all that great. You should read everything they have available, then drop me an email, or give me a call, before you start running any campaigns, or spending any additional money. I’ll be more than happy to share my personal experiences with you.

Warm regards,

Rusty Campbell
rustyc@mtisoftware.com
419-424-3896

If you've thought about making videos and putting on the web, take a look at Brad Fallon's podcast at Free Line. He discussed some free video editing tools which can be quite valuable.

Animoto, MuveeMix, JumpCut, EyeSpot, and Kaltura. I'm not going into a long winded description of these tools, because Brad does an excellent job of reviewing them. Just let me say that these tools can quickly move you into the video space.

I just finished the Adsense Code... yeah, yeah, I should have read it a long time ago.  Just too many things to do. Anyway, I found it rather informative. It's mostly about tweaking your ads to increase their clickthrough rates.

Joel Comm discusses a number of very informative and important topics that you should understand if you are using Adsense. Some of the things he covers in his book are:

• Using colors to increase your clicks
• How to maximize visibility and response
• Controlling ad placement
• Using the Google search box
• Using multiple ad blocks
• Writing relevant content
• Response tracking and testing.
• Do's and don'ts about Adsense

He has links to resources and tools, some free, some rather pricey. He has set up affiliate linking for most of them so he can get a piece of the action.

The price is right on this book.  If you can't find enough info on Adsense to get your 15-17.00 back, you are just not using Adsense.

I put a tutorial up at http://www.marketingideasandtools.com/website_development.html on how to create a website. It's primarily pointed at a beginner who wants to create a commercial site.

It goes through all of the processes you will need to work with.

• Choose a topic or niche
• Select a domain name
• Create the site blueprint.
• Purchase hosting
• Choose and HTML editor and other website tools.
• Create the look and feel for you website.
• Drive traffic to your website.
• Monetize your website.

If you're trying to get going in internet marketing, but the website thing is beyond your ability, check it out.

http://www.marketingideasandtools.com/website_development.html

If you are setting up a web site to market a product on the Internet, one of the first things you should do is define the niche you will focus on. Is is important that you choose a niche that is small enough that you won't have to compete with large companies. On the other side, it has to be large enough to attract a reasonable amount of traffic.

The first thing to do is brainstorm to get a few ideas to explore. You just need a few, say half a dozen. After you gather up a few ideas, you will need to do some keyword research on your topics. Pick topics that you are interested in. Things you have a passion for. It is much easier to write great content when you are passionate about the subject.

You can do keyword research to help choose your topic. There are a number of ways to do keyword research, some for free, some not. You should start by creating an Adwords account at Google. Even if you don't intend to do pay per click (PPC) advertising, the tools available there can give you a lot of information as to the popularity of niche you are researching, and it will show how heavy the competition for the keyword will be as well.

After you get your Adwords account setup, login and click tools/keyword tools. Then you can enter a keyword or keyword phrase that you feel represents your topic. Google will generate a list of keyword that are relevant to your topic.

You can see there are 3 columns to get an idea of how your keywords will work. First, if they have high competition, will be difficult to achieve highs rankings, or affordable PPC. Lower competition with adequate search volume is what you need to look for. Choose a topic with lots of keywords that have low to medium competition, and have decent popularity.

Clickbank is another useful resource. Here is an example of an affiliate product that you can sell.

You can sort the products by popularity, and see the statistics for products close to your topic, even if you don't wish to market these specific products. A high gravity (grav) suggests a very popular product. This can give you a general idea of how popular your topic is.

Your topic needs to be in demand. A reasonable number of people must be searching for information in your topic. If it is too narrow, there will not enough interest in your topic.

Your topic cannot be too broad. A broad topic will have huge competition. The competing web sites are too numerous. Also broad themes will have major companies competing for the niche. A tight niche, even though it has good demand will have less competition. The big companies will find it too small to mess with, that makes it just right for the little guy to rank their pages in the search engines, or afford the PPC. You will get highly targeted traffic that tends to be easier to sell that broad untargeted traffic.

Your niche must have high return on investment (ROI) possibilities. You should have multiple ways to make a profit from your site. If you take some time and planning at this stage, before you are committed to building your site, you will be able to hit the ground running when you actually begin marketing your site.

I've setup a basic instruction manual for creating a web site to market a product. You can find it at http://www.marketingideasandtools.com/website_development.html. If you're a beginner, you should find it helpful.

I just read a really great article on squeeze pages at StomperBlog.com. Truly a must read for anyone building an email list.

Andy Jenkins goes into an interesting discussion a method he calls a reverse squeeze. Rather than requiring the email address to get the bonus or product, he freely offers the prize first, and then asks for the opt-in.

I'm having some difficulty with one of my Adwords campaigns. After being online for 4 months, and having just begun going profitable, Google raised the minimum bids to $10.00 from $.05-$.50. It looks like there was a technical glitch in the linking that may have caused the problem, but I won't be able to tell until Google crawls it again.

Well, when this happened, I emailed Google support. It truly amazed me at the incompetence of the support personnel. After waiting 5 days for their response (they say on their web site it is usually within one business day), I received a generic email pointing me to the help area in Adwords. It was obvious they had never even looked at the site.

I responded by asking for a more specific answer to the problem. They came back with a detailed analysis that Google didn't like the business model because this was a review site. Of course there are thousands of review sites using Adwords all over the Internet. This might cause a small increase, but shouldn't cause this kind of slam.

I responded by focusing on some specifics of his answer. Then it got complicated. The person that was handling my case got sick and they moved it to two others. The first told me I didn't have a positive ROI, and didn't see that I had not enabled conversion tracking. He later emailed back and apologized. A complete waste of time.

Then I received an email from another support person who told me that I hadn't included my billing information, and that is why the ads weren't showing. I responded with an email that explained I had already spent $3000.00 over the last 4 months, and that most of my campaigns are running just fine. I can't wait until I see her response.

In over a decade on the internet and 2 decades working with computers, I have seen some bad support. This may well be the worst ever. One would think a company the size of Google would hire people that were basically competent. I'm sure there will be more to come on this debacle.

SBI (Site Build It) is the greatest thing for web site newbies since sliced bread. Even though I develop my own web sites, and I'm pretty good at it, I bought an SBI site myself.

The fact is, they have a huge array of tools to help you get your sites noticed. When you add up all the things you will have available to you, the admission fee is small change.

They step by step tutorials to walk you through the process of building your web site. Anyone who can read can do it. You don't need to have technical knowledge at all.

Bottom line is... if you're interested in a real internet web site, that you can build into a profitable home business, you need to check this company out.

Here is a page of SBI owners that have made videos about their SBI experiences. I love SBI.

The following video is the heart warming story of a successful SBI mother.

I was talking to Jason Isaksen on the phone today, and he made a really great suggestion.  His suggestion was, the free Affiliate File Cabinet application that we released a week or so ago should automatically open your web browser and go to the URLs stored in the app.

I thought this was a truly time saving addition, so I just put a new version on www.affiliatefilecabinet.com with the new feature implemented.

If you've already downloaded AFC, and entered your data in it, you can just install the new version over the old.  It won't affect your data at all.

We are releasing the beta of The Affiliate File Cabinet.  It's software to store the information you collect as an affiliate marketer.

You can store...

• Affiliate merchant information
• Website information
• Domain names
• Web hosting company information
• Domain registrar information

All the information will be in one place. Easy to find and use. It uses simple copy & paste to enter data. Best of all it will only take a few minutes to learn how to use The Affiliate File Cabinet.

Download it for free at: http://www.affiliatefilecabinet.com

I started developing websites in 1996. I wrote some software that I was selling over the net at the time. I had a simple 5 page site that was not particularly optimized or well marketed. Over time, the business flourished in spite of itself. I hooked up with a marketer, and by 2000 we had sold over a million dollars worth of software.

The business changed. SEO, search engine optimization, became the standard. The search engines became more and more competitive. Social networking and blogging grew to astounding popularity. As connections to the internet got faster, videos and other large bandwidth users became viable.

The web today is nothing like the web of the 90's. It is faster, more interactive, and easier to access. Most people research all kinds of things on the web. It's become such a major resource that I for one, can't even imagine doing without it. My wife even spends time on the search engines researching things she has questions about, and believe me, she is probably the most anti-technology being on the planet.

You need to keep up with the changes in website development. Yet you may want to stay back a bit from the cutting edge. I've always called it the bleeding edge because of the effort involved understanding and using new and buggy technologies that don't have good documentation as yet.

Staying back a year or so, gives the newest technologies a chance to mature. That way you won't waste your time dealing with technologies that aren't ready for prime time. That said, you do need to be aware of what's coming. When the tools are built to use the new stuff easily, you'll be ready.

That said, it is disastrous to get too far behind. You need to gather up, and use new technologies, and ideas as they become reasonably easy to work with. You should keep an eye on your competition. Often, they will point the way to new directions you should be traveling.

A good way to keep up with what is going on in the internet is to subscribe to a few rss feeds from sites like Slashdot. There is a lot of noise, and you can't believe everything they say, but they do keep up with the newest technologies. Another good feed is Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim. It's fairly general and self-serving, but he has a nugget from time to time that is valuable to the internet marketer, or website owner.

There are many resources on the internet to help you stay current. You need to spend some time every day keeping an eye on advancements.