Recently I have had many thoughts and conversations and what it truly takes to create success in a home based business. If we were to look at the statistics of successful home business owners versus unsuccessful ones, I am pretty sure the majority of the numbers would point towards those who have failed, given up or have not yet experienced the success they had expected. In fact, if we look at any business or industry, not singling out just network marketing, the statistics would be in favor of the unsuccessful.

It’s a sad thing, I know…..but in my industry, network marketing, there’s a significant difference between those who succeed and those who don’t. That difference is contained in the word “Expert!” That’s the secret. In order to truly succeed in your home business, you MUST become an expert in your field. There’s no way around it.

Now, I know there are success stories of people who have zero experience that come into a home business and make a ton of money really quickly…..but where’s the rest of the story? Someone can make a quarter million dollars with a good home business opportunity simply by pursuing their warm market….the people they know. But what happens when that warm market is all spent. They are stuck in the mud without  four wheel drive and the momentum they had once before because they have run out of people to talk to about their amazing home business. And guys, I’m not making this up! I have seen it happen over and over again. They come, they have an awesome first year, they halt in income, and they check out. This is one of the reasons you see people doing what we call “Opportunity Jumping.”

The secret to true, prolonged consistent success in a home business, is to become an Expert. And what I mean by that, is to become really, really good at whatever it is you do. To give you an example: You can obviously see my blog, since you are reading it at this very moment. I have some decent traffic coming into this site through the marketing I have done for it. I rank first page on Google, Yahoo and Bing for some of the most competitive keyphrases in my industry. I have a presence on the internet and have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars because of it. Now, a year and a half after starting this business, I had no clue about marketing. I was having someone else do it all for me and was paying them to do it. I distinctly remember not even knowing what a URL was or that it needed an http://. I was clueless.

But you know what happened? The paid marketing fell through and I was forced to learn it all. I studied, I Googled,  I did everything I needed to do to learn how to market. I became and expert in my field. I became really good at what I do and in order to create prolonged success, that’s what it takes. Sure, you may make money by paying someone else to do it all for you, but what happens when that falls through? What happens when your new distributor gets started and your marketing guy can’t take any more clients? Then what? You must become a marketing expert! It’s all about duplication…..and that is able to be duplicated.

When all the smoke and mirrors are gone, the excitement of starting that new business wears off and your warm market is exhausted, your success really teeters on how good you really are in your niche. If you are actively engaged in your self education, you’ll excel and create the success that you deserve…..and you’ll keep it going for a really long time. Become an expert marketer and success will follow you like it has never done before. I promise you that!

Email Marketing is a great tool that can increase many areas of your business including residual income, repeat purchases from current customers, lead generation, education to your current customer base and if your into network marketing like me, find future distributors and business partners.

For those of you who are brand new to the term, “email marketing,” it’s a way to create a following, or a list of people that have opted in to receiving emails from you or your company. In a sense, you are building a list of emails from people who might be interested in what you have to share. Now, you can probably agree that most don’t sign up for your email campaign to receive daily sales pitches to their inbox. That is the less effective way to email marketing. Just as it is with blogging, the way to promote your product or service is to offer something for free that is of value to your readers. They get something out of the deal first. They you can subtly offer your product or service.

Most people in your list will simply enjoy the “Free Value” of your efforts while others will take further action. And example offering a free newsletter with tips about making money from home. As you can see, I have an “Empowering Quotes” opt-in form to the right. There are many things you can do to offer something free and something of value.

But I’m not here to teach you how to do an email marketing campaign, there are tutorials all over the internet that can do that for you. I simply wanted to give you three different options, all with at least a 30 day trial period, to start your email marketing with. Each is unique in design and functionality.

1. AWeber – AWeber is the easiest one to use in my opinion. From creating emails to contact forms, the ease of use is second to none. They have tutorials guiding you step by step along the way. The first month is $1 and depending on your email list, the price starts at $20 per month.
2. Constant Contact – I just signed up for the trial. Most email marketing sites have a standard “enter your email” form that leads to a separate subscribe page where the subscriber can enter more details about themselves. This is one of them. I was referred to this one through my web hosting company, Ipower.com and has a free 60 day trial period.
3. Rate Point – This one is very similar to Constant Contact with a free 30 day trial.

In the income opportunity I am involved in, I use a tool called NorthStar to manage my email marketing campaign. It is only available to those who are part of my business. If I had to choose between the three listed here, Aweber is my choice over the other two and there are probably more options on the net. Do your research, get started on building your list of contacts and watch your business grow in ways it wasn’t before! Have fun with it and be creative in your marketing approach.

As many of you know I am a home based business entrepreneur and have been working from home for the last 5 years. Every once in a while I have people who want to know why I chose to get involved in a home business instead of doing some kind of brick and mortar business. The answer is simple, it’s all about lifestyle for me. I wanted so much more than just the bi-weekly pay check with two weeks of paid vacation. That’s a life of misery. I wanted financial freedom and the time freedom to enjoy it. I wanted to be at home, to be my own boss and set my own schedule. That’s why I choose to stay right where I am. It’s lucrative, it has given me lifestyle and I am my own boss. What more could you ask for?

So as you all know, a business requires marketing. I do several things for my marketing but my major source of lead generation is through my self-hosted Wordpress blog. I share tips on mindset, personal development and business opportunity and by doing so, people naturally become interested in what I do. For me, it generates some of the highest quality leads one can get. If they like my content, chances are, they will enjoy my business as well. The perfect lead! Qualified with a common interest.

With my Wordpress blog, I have certain plugins I use to promote my content and extend its capabilities. If you have any good ideas for new plugins, I’d sure like to try them out. They are as follow:

• Platinum SEO Pack – Prepares your blog for Search Engine Optimization
• All in one Adsense – Enables the all popular ad serving network of Google to place relevant ads on your site. I also use it to place a contact form directly following each of my blog posts.
• Twitter Tools – Connects your blog with your Twitter account and updates your Twitter account every time you publish a post.
• WPing.fm – This plugin makes ‘Twitter Tools’ and ‘Wordbook’ nearly worthless. It uses a service called Ping.fm to automatically send a status update every time a blog post is published with a link back to your post.
• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade – This doesn’t necessarily assist in extending my blog but is a very convenient plugin. The name should be pretty self explanatory.
• Vipers Video Quicktags – This makes posting videos to your blog posts easy!
• Google XML Sitemaps – This will aid you in a few things. It helps you track the health of your blog by seeing how Google, Bing and Yahoo search bots view your site. It also gets your site indexed with the major search engines quickly.
• Add to Any -This is a social bookmarking plugin that allows your readers to quickly share your content on various social sites around the web.
• Stray Random Quotes – I love quotes and love to share them. This is a plugin that will easily allow you to add quotes to your blog in various locations. Have the quotes rotate, stay the same or change with each visit.
• Wordbook – Updates your facebook account with every published, edited or revised post and/or page.
• Yet Another Related Post Plugin – Enables your readers to get deeper into your archived posts. It shows posts with similar tags and topics below the post they are currently reading.

Feel free to look them up in the “plugins” section of your Wordpress back office to see what they do. Each of them play a significant role in my marketing campaign.

One of the beauties of being self employed is your ability to literally dictate your schedule as the day goes. This weekend is going to be a busy weekend for all of us parents. Today happens to be my oldest daughters birthday and this morning, my second daughter received her very first award in her school today. It’s nice to have the freedom to just go. No approval from the boss, no worry over losing paid work hours….just the freedom to go and do.

Now as you all know, it is Halloween today and if you have a family, with children, your weekend is going to be busy. Get out with your kids. Be young again and dress up. Have a blast! But as I have always said, be your business. With what I do, I am able to integrate my business into my lifestyle. So just because I am off during the holidays doesn’t mean I’m not generating revenue. That’s the whole point of a home business. It integrates itself with your lifestyle. Some of my best days, weeks and months in my business have come when out having fun.

You become your business. You can’t really sell it to anyone. The only value given to it is what you give to it. Live your life and throw your business around it. If you are open and alert, marketing opportunities will be available to you almost anywhere you go and with nearly anything you do. Should you choose to jump on Facebook to see what your friends are up to, if you are your business, people will start asking questions. Should you choose to go to the store, if you are your business, conversations will start and people will ask what you do.

With a pocket full of business cards and drop cards, an open mind and a smile, opportunities to grow your home business are abundant. But you have to be looking. Once and entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. In my opinion, if you are looking to get away from your business completely, the only option is to quit, sell it or get a job. The ones who are paid a wage can truly say, that when 6pm rolls around, they are OFF of work and don’t even have to think about it until the next morning the moment their alarm clock rings. With a business, it’s different. If it doesn’t consume you, within reason, you are probably getting mediocre results. The moment you allow yourself and your business mold together is the moment things start happening. That’s called passion.

So Happy Halloween everyone. As you are out tomorrow with your kids, look for opportunities. They will be everywhere!

Many of you know that I am part of many social networking sites on the net. Honestly, creating profiles on social sites has been a little addicting and before I knew it, I was part of several hundred social sites ranging from Home Based Business Communities to Personal Development Communities. Trying to stay somewhat active in all of them is quite frankly impossible.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish was to link all of these social sites with my blog so that when I published a blog post, it would show on my social profiles. Some social networks aren’t as advanced as others, so I wanted to pick several of the main ones I was active on. Some of the big ones are Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and Twitter. How could I update these places without having to do them all individually or without having to find a Wordpress plugin for each individual social site?

I discovered a site called Ping.fm that did exactly what I was looking for. It is a site that can send an update to all of these major social sites as well as many others simply by typing it on their website. All I had to do is configure my social sites on Ping.fm, enter an update and click “Ping It!” It keeps track of your character count for the character sensitive micro blogging sites such as Twitter. You can also choose what you want the service to do on any specific social site such as micro blog or status update.

So, the next task was to figure out how to update all of these social sites every time I post a blog entry with a link back to my blog post. Since I use Wordpress software to power this blog, I found a plugin that works perfectly called WPing.fm. You can configure this plugin to update Ping.fm with the title and a link to your blog post. Very cool!

This one plugin has increased my readership to my blog and saved me so much time. I have made thousands of dollars from the readership I get from this service as well.

They are continually adding new social sites to their list so check back to Ping.fm frequently.

For me, I give it 5 stars out of 5.

If there is a better service out there, I would like to hear about it. Because as of right now, Ping.fm is it!