For those interested in starting a home business it is easy to imagine days lounging around in their pajamas with the occasional glance at a laptop screen.  While it is a delightful image, it has little bearing on reality if you want the business to succeed.

Organization is perhaps even more important at home than it is in an office – since there are so many more distractions.  Here are some important tips on how to create a successful atmosphere for your home based company.

Set up Space

It doesn’t matter if you pick the dining room table, a separate office or a nook in your bedroom, but you must have a space which is used specifically for business.  Aside from the benefit of not needing to move your things around all the time, arranging a space that is dedicated to work means you will enter a work mind frame when you get there.

Set up your space with everything you need in order to focus:  computer, files, telephone, fax or any business specific tools.  Keep the area as free of clutter as possible and don’t bring anything else into the space.  A wall chart with your goals and to do lists can help you zero in on necessary tasks each day.

Schedule your Day

No home based entrepreneur will ever tell you that you must work from 9-5 during weekdays.  In fact, one of the best aspects of running your own business is that you get to set your hours.  That said, it is important to point out that you must set your hours. Expect to spend at least as many hours at your home venture as you would in an office, especially right at the beginning.

Each day should revolve around activities that increase your income.  Spending an hour of “work time” playing solitaire or World of Warcraft is a waste of your time and not productive.  Keep such activities for after hours and watch how your increased productivity improves your bottom line.

In order to be successful with your home based business you actually need to understand that you will be working, hard, to create the kind of income you want.  The real difference is that you will profit directly from your efforts, and you will be doing something you truly enjoy.

More on this in my post here:
Extreme time management tactics for increasing your productivity

Having your own business coach can definitely increase your odds of success when starting a new business. By learning a range of techniques to support your MLM sponsoring, you will generate a much more consistent income for yourself.

Mentoring Required

Unless you are working with an extremely unusual MLM company, you will be expected to recruit other individuals into your downline.  MLM sponsoring is the main way you earn money with this model.

If you prefer a GPT (Get Paid Today) business model, check out the powerful combination of CCPro driven marketing and Wealth Masters compensation – click here for more info.

The need to do massive MLM sponsoring to build up your monthly check can make new entrepreneurs feel quite desperate as they try to convince everyone they meet that they too should jump on the bandwagon.  Few techniques are less effective than the hard sell.

The best way to get someone interested in what you are doing is to appear interested in what they want to achieve.  If you show that not only are you enjoying what you’re doing, but that you are also willing to listen to people and relate to how you can help them succeed, you will have a built a following who are keen to join you.

Best of all, you can offer to help them avoid the mistakes you and others have made, ensuring their success and your residual income.

Loyalty Pays Off

The people you mentor, if you are good to them, will remain loyal to you if you choose to change your approach or product line.  That means that if you find other opportunities and decide to pursue these, you already have a downline ready and waiting to go with you.  You won’t have to rebuild from the start just because you decide to explore a new option.

Remember, if you are making other people money through your MLM sponsoring techniques, they will be loyal to you and make you money back again.

Your own Sponsor

Of course it goes without saying that you should have started out with a great mentor.

Your MLM sponsor will help you create the exact type of success you so desire, and will continue to be available to answer questions, help you design successful business plans, and even, possibly, offer you the chance to get in on the bottom floor of a new opportunity.

This is the exact mentoring I give my own personal team – so if that is something you are looking for in order to move your business foward, do get in touch – contact me on skype (ID jayallyson) or facebook.com/jayallyson.

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What is my story marketing?

As a marketer we tell stories to our prospects, including our own …it’s an effective marketing tactic known as self-marketing or my story marketing (a term coined by Jimmy Davis).

Seth Godin just posted something that got me thinking about this again: “What story do you tell yourself?”

Self-talk and mindset mastery are as important to your business success as good marketing techniques … in fact, this is one of three critical elements I teach my new members – work as hard on yourself, if not harder than you do on your business!

You can find full details in my free 7 part success blueprint, which captures all three elements in one business funnel -you can grab it from my TheMerryMarketer Facebook fan page. Click ‘Like’ then click the Coaching tab for free access to my story marketing approaches.

Are you willing to work for your success? Do you believe you have the drive to make a high income business opportunity work for you?

Are you a driven, organized individual who wants the chance to make serious money and live the kind of lifestyle you have only dreamed possible until now? If you answered yes to these questions, I can show you how to make the transition.

Finding the Right Opportunity

Take some time to write down all of your skills. Some might seem silly to you, because as a stay at home mom you may not have thought much of them.

Still, most mothers multitask, keep up with complicated schedules, manage money, and have their finger on the pulse of growing trends among youth.

Believe me, all of that is very valuable in starting your own business.

What kind of business interests you?

Do you like to interact with people and possess a lot of charm and grace? A business selling a specific product you are passionate about is a great fit. If you have a literary background, than hiring yourself out as a writer is a great way to rake in some extra dough.

If you have exceptional organizational skills, and all of the neighborhoods’ moms count on you to help arrange birthday parties and field trips, you will probably do well with a catering firm or as a virtual assistant. There are plenty of choices!

Plan for Success

To succeed, especially online, you need a good business plan. This plan should take into consideration your marketing arrangement, where you will gain funding, your anticipated growth rate, areas in which you will need help and much more.

If you are in need of help in a particular area, or have no idea how to write a business plan, spend some money to hire a business coach who will help you start out on the right foot and keep you from making costly mistakes.

Are you ready to learn how to build a profitable online home business now? Then make sure you check out the resource box below and follow the link within it.

For more guidance, click here to receive my high income business newsletter.

I’m doing the whole ‘proud’ mentor here … seeing two of my new team members  up in lights on our leader board as RISING STARS. That doesn’t happen by sitting back – activity generates RESULTS – and here’s the proof.

Very many congratulations to Chris and Grace. Well done on your leadership and keep up the great work. You’re stars! Jay

Click the image to enlarge

Having struggled to generate leads with a traditional home based network marketing business, I ditched the cold calling bought leads and put my business online.

The learning curve was steep and personal development was a critical component in my success. Once I knew how I could generate my own leads via the internet just by sharing my knowledge, I knew I would be able to build a business.

When I learned about attraction marketing and explored social marketing, this is when the penny finally dropped. I understood how I could use the internet to have high quality leads coming into my business every single day.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE TO FIND OUT JUST WHAT I DID

The economy is in the dumps, the Dow Jones Index continues to drop and housing prices are tanking.  Too many people have found themselves upside down in their mortgages, and that means that starting a home business for extra income may no longer be an option, rather it has become a requirement.

There are many options for home based businesses, whether they are stand alone ventures, MLM partnerships, service based companies or anything else, there are some commonalities.

Let’s look at some of the essential components of starting up a successful home based business.

Do your research

For whatever reason too many people forget to engage in serious research before they spend their hard earned dollars.  Entering a saturated marketplace, regardless of the type of business, is a great way to end up discouraged and poorer. Whether you plan to open a small child care program or sell a unique and exciting product, you need to know that there is a market available for what you will be offering.

Research is easily conducted online.  For example, if you want to take in some children, find out how many such facilities are available in your area, what kinds of regulations will apply, and whether there is a demand or an excess. You can still successfully run such a business even if there is an excess, if you offer something unique, such as night time hours in a town that has many swing shifts.

Figure Out your Financing

How do you plan to pay for your new endeavour?  If your goal is to run an internet business where you provide and sell information, then all you really need is a good computer.  On the other hand, if you plan to run a global “with-what” empire, you will need access to your product, a way to ship it, a merchant account so you can accept credit card orders online, a marketing plan and much more.

Take the time to sit down, possibly with a good home business success coach, and figure out how much you will need to start your business.  Then add some for unanticipated emergencies and incidentals.  Finally, figure out where you can get the financing you need.  That source can be savings, family, friends or a bank, it all depends on the sum and what makes you comfortable.

Launch your business

If you plan to do business on the internet, the sooner you get a functional website up and running, the sooner you will make money.  This may be a blog, but should offer a hub for your business and brand and must be self-hosted to avoid any risk of it being taken down by guest hosting. E.g. use wordpress.org like this blog on your own named, self-hosted domain, rather than wordpress.com. You can find out how to do this by going to a reputable domain hosting vendor, like GoDaddy.

GoDaddy Blog Hosting includes your domain name, web hosting and guidance on how to set up and link to wordpress.org … so you can have a blog up and running in minutes.

The key to your profits lies in your marketing plan.  Online marketing efforts are different from traditional circumstances.  You will need to learn how to make your link easily identified and attractive to search engine crawlers.  A typical plan involves a blog, articles, videos, small ads, affiliate programs and free promotional content. Once you establish your brand and have some free traffic coming in, and some cash flow, you might move to paid advertising such as pay-per-click on the search engines.

It takes time to build a successful marketing system, but you can shorten that duration by using an automated marketing system.  Find one that has a proven track record of online success. Take advantage of the expert marketing education that program provides, so you build up your knowledge and skills and avoid common mistakes as well.

With good planning and excellent training and mentoring, it won’t be long before you start seeing that extra income in your pocket.

Find out my personal strategy for starting a home business & get my free 7-day business builder ‘Success Blueprint’ – just fill out your name and email in the form at the top of my blog here.

What’s the Best Social Media for Marketing?

Once you have taken the time to research and choose your particular niche, you want to develop a multi-pronged product marketing strategy using the best social media to drive leads to your site, consistently over time.

Content Divas, Jay Allyson from Master Marketing Event 2010

You may have the best dang product on the market, but if no one knows you exist it will never matter.  Furthermore, if you just send out a blast of adverts now and again, it’s not a sustainable strategy. The best social media are those you use regularly and consistently over several months and years to build up a loyal following.

Every marketing plan needs to consider, at the very least, the following:

Three best social media I use in my personal business marketing

Articles

Articles are one of the very best social media you can use. They can quickly begin the process of establishing yourself as an authority.

Research your topic well and identify high demand, low supply keyword phrases to pin your piece against as part of your titles and descriptions and tags.

Articles have an incredibly long shelf life, which is why they are one of my best social media marketing techniques. Once written, your keyword rich article could be the foundation of consistent traffic, growing every month.

Publishing in high value, established article directories like ezinearticles.com and articlesbase.com and niche directories, e.g. bizymoms.com, which have PRs anywhere between 4 and 8 (top ranked pages are 10s), will get your article ranked high in the searches so more people will find you.

The same goes for Press Releases … a specific time-sensitive article that the search engines gobble up makes these another best social media. I’ve grouped these with articles though since you can easily repurpose your base article to turn it into a ‘news’ item.

You can publish a press release and literally seconds or minutes later be on page one of google, yahoo/bing.

Video Presentations

The popularity of video download sites like YouTube is enough to tell you that video channels are one of the best social media tools, but you have to use them correctly. You need to do more than just talk about what you want to offer people.

However, by putting a face to a name you develop a stronger relationship with potential customers.  You also get to actually display your enthusiasm for your product or service.

For example, writing about your experience running in a particular shoe is nice, but actually providing visual feedback is even better.  Let’s face it folks, we are an increasingly visual society, so make use of the services that can help you to connect with your audience.

Blog Away

Especially if your niche is targeting a range of ages and locations of people, you must blog.  A good, active blog is another of my best social media techniques. Provide good value and posting consistently will signal the search engines that you have content worth indexing.

It also provides the possibility of affiliate marketing that can increase your bottom line, even from people who never buy directly from you or join your business or service.

Your blog can be used as a venue that directs traffic to another site you own, and help your SEO linking strategies to rank you higher in the search returns.

Using social networking sites to connect to those who are interested in your niche will allow you to occasionally drop your website address into the conversation without resorting to a hard sell, or direct them to your blog and from there to your money page.

Multi tasking is the key

Think in levels of interaction and linkage rather than a direct “A leads to B” approach.  You should be blogging, writing articles, creating videos and making use of the best social media networking sites to promote your content, cross-linking all of your pages together and searching for great affiliate marketing connections.

Each day should involve something that promotes your product marketing strategy so you can reach more people all the time.

If you have picked your niche well, you won’t have excessive competition, but you will still need to attract your clientele effectively.

Learn the marketing skills you need to use the best social media to turn your company into a known brand and a successful source of steady income.