Did you know that more than 50% of small businesses don’t have a website? For me, it’s insane to think about running a business without one. Call me an internet nerd, but when I think of starting a business, the first thing I think of taking care of is snagging up a good domain name……not finding investors or establishing an LLC. If I can’t get a good domain name, FORGET ABOUT IT! The business won’t work! I know…I’m weird like that. But that’s how important I feel a website is to a business. Instead of asking for a business card, people often ask for a website. It’s a form of validation and tells your potential customers who you are and what you offer.

And I’m willing to bet that the number of businesses without websites is even higher, including within home based businesses. When I first entered the industry of network marketing, some of the top income earners in the industry were still using solely traditional marketing techniques to generate their customer base: Print ads, billboards and direct mailing. Only after noticing the gradual decline in their income and the gradual incline in those who had a web presence did they inherit an interest to learn. Think about it. How many home based businesses do you know of that depend on house parties and hotel meetings to promote their product or service? And how many of those business truly succeed on an individual basis?

Unless you consider an average of less than a thousand dollars a year a success, not many!

A business without a website is like milk without the cookies…..they’re just not as good by themselves.

I don’t know what keeps business owners from creating a site for their business. Maybe a lack of knowledge or an unnecessary additional expense. Whatever it is, if you’re a small business owner, it is worth the effort. Think about the pros and cons.

Marketing/Advertising Cost = $600/month for a billboard OR ten years for a domain and hosting (for you beginners….a website).

Reach = Potentially world-wide with the ability to be found in first page results, all over the world, for the key phrase of your choice.

Maintenance = Virtually none aside from an occasional blog post or product update. Again…it’s worth it. Give and you’ll get.

Traffic = The chances of someone building a freeway next to your billboard for a drastic traffic spike are slim. There is no limit to the amount of traffic you can receive to a site. And it’s extremely targeted! You’ll never see a billboard go viral like a helpful article online.

If done right, a website for your business can make a VERY significant difference in your results. It’s all about branding yourself and extending your reach. More visitors to your business is a good thing. That’s what a website does….it brings traffic….and traffic equals dollar signs where I come from.

If you are a business owner and need help getting started, let me know. I have assisted business owners create successful small business websites for their business over the last several years. Look at my website as an example. Centered around the Home Based Business industry, I rank first page for key phrases such as home based business and business opportunity, to name a few. To take the first step, Click HERE.

I can’t tell you how many times I have told friends of mine about my blog here on CreateFinancialWealth.com and have received a weird response. I know what goes through some of their minds. For the most part, they usually don’t say much about it because they don’t know much about it. Most people probably think that blogs are for girls….mothers that are looking to put up family information for the grandparents to look at and get all emotional over. I’m sure that some think that blogging is for geeks or computer nerds who don’t hunt, fish or do much of anything else in the world besides hang out in their whitey tighties in their mommas basement.

People used to think that way…until they learned the kind of income I generate through this blog.

The truth is….if you are someone that knows much of anything about anything, you can create a significant presence online blogging about it. Big deal right? A presence. What the heck is that? For a business with a good idea, people just have to know you exist. That’s presence. But rather than putting up a billboard, you put up a blog.

WHAT? Did I just say a blog is a business?

The more you search the Net the more you will start to realize that most of the sites in the top of the search engines have a blog built into them or are primarily a blog. Search engines will love you if you know anything about anything and are able to turn that knowledge into a blog. So yes, a blog is a business….and it means $$$ dollar signs, if you know how to manage it.

Through this blog, I have made hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you look around this site, there’s not a ton of ads everywhere. I’m not an e-commerce site like Ebay or Amazon. Google Adsense wasn’t my money maker. With the presence I have created with this blog, I can do anything. Literally anything….because I have the presence.

Now, the reason I am saying all of this is because I know the magnitude of where I am and where anyone could be. Including you! If you have a passion for something, think about starting a blog in your chosen niche and become the Guru that people find in the search engines. It’s A LOT easier than you think. Once you get the listings, the traffic and the presence, you’ll get the $$.

Still think blogging is for girls? Fill out the form on the contact us page to learn exactly how I did it.

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.