For about 7 days, I disappeared from the Internet scene.

And my online business came to a complete standstill. I was miserable, hopelessly insane with anger, confused, desperate to get back online because my business and my income depended fully on my Internet access. I was nothing without it. I am a virtual person and if I don’t go online for a day, I would raise HELL.

This is how important being online is to my business. And let me tell you how my freelance and work at home business works.

The email

For starters, there’s the email. Gawd, I can’t live without my email. I communicate with my sister, father and aunts via email. I talk and gossip with my good friends over email. I communicate religiously with my clients over email. Without email, I don’t have a voice.

For a freelancer who is working from home, like me, using the email to communicate with clients, customers, friends and relatives is not unknown. In fact, I would advice freelancers and work at home parents to use emails liberally, even if you’re just using one of those free email accounts from Yahoo!, MSN, GMail, or Hotmail.whatever it is, it’s important for a work at home business person to maintain constant contact with his or her customers. It’s best that you respond to emails within 24 – 48 hours. Anything slower than that, you’ll be regarded as a snail-mailer or unresponsive or not committed.

The Messenger

Let’s take things a step up – instant communication doesn’t only involve communicating over email. For those of you who have not tried out either Yahoo! Messenger or MSN Messenger, you’re missing out on a whole lot here! You can use the Messenger service to communicate LIVE with your clients and customers and discuss things completely fee-free on the Internet. It’s not as good as making a phone call but if both of you can type relatively fast, using the MSN or Yahoo! Messenger is very effective. Not only are you able to send short (or long) messages to each other instantly, you can also talk to each other using the voice conference facilities or the webcam tool.

To me, the Messenger service is as important as my email.

My website

Without Internet access, I, obviously, was unable to update my website. I update my website with articles, tips and tricks on a daily basis and if I don’t do that, I might as well be out of the freelancing scene. I consider my website,  and maximize revenue tips as important marketing vehicles for my business. Through the website, I am able to bring attention to my services and products very subtly by driving traffic in with useful tips, resources, articles and other information. Despite being a Graphic Designer who can and have designed physical brochures and flyers for others and myself, my website remains to be one of the most important marketing tools for me.

My voice conference room

I use the conference room that I have been using for the past 1 year to communicate, provide training, hold presentations and just TALK to my clients freely on the Internet. I obtained my voice conference room at an amazingly affordable price from http://www.ttcglobaltalk.com and I have been using them happily for ages. And when I was out of the scene, I had a dream about not being able to talk to my clients – EVER! Yes, I was desperate.

And I am now back onlineI can’t tell you how thankful I am for it. Although I had to struggle and exchange ‘heated debates’ over the phone with the Internet service provider over here for the past week, I feel that I am now alive again and that my business is back on track.

Use online communication tools wisely because for a freelancer, it’s crucial.

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No, this baby boom will certainly not swamp the Social Security
system (sort of a bad joke for those that live in the United
States, but many other countries…most notably Japan…have an
even more acute problem), but this baby boom is revolutionizing
the way that pay per click advertising is being spread across the
Internet.

One of the early participants in this pay per click baby boom was
Google, with its AdSense program. With this program, Google
shares pay per click revenue with a huge number of individual
partner websites that carry a few pay per click ads that are
distributed by Google. In essence, this creates a whole bunch of
little pay per click locations (websites) throughout the Internet
and hence the term “pay per click baby boom”.

Conceptually, programs like AdSense are similar to what the
computer hardware folks refer to a distributed processing.
Instead of trying to draw everyone to a large pay per click
search engine site, little groups of pay per click ads are spread
widely across thousands of locations (websites) all over the
Internet.

Actually, this distributed processing or propagation technique is
not limited to pay per click advertising. For example, Amazon
uses a similar arrangement (called Amazon Associates) to sell the
products it carries on amazon.com and ClickBank has a sales
program called CBAdwords which operates in a similar fashion.

According my trusty Ouija board, it seems likely that most
commercial hubs on the Internet will be shifting to this
propagation concept as time progresses…all of those individual
partner websites that carry the message/proposition will
constitute the vast army of worker ants that keep the queen ant
alive and healthy.

From a pay per click marketing perspective, these programs make
brilliant use of leverage while providing highly targeted
prospects for the paying advertiser.

There are, of course, some interesting things that occur as a
result of all of this stuff. For example, consider what I call
the “cross fertilization effect”: Suppose a person goes to
yahoo.com and performs a search that leads them to one of my
websites that happens carry Google AdSense ads and that visitor
then clicks on one of those ads…the net result is that Yahoo
natural search provided Google pay per click with some revenue!
Aren’t these fun times that we’re living in?

As these programs continue to proliferate, the individual
webmaster needs to exercise a little restraint and avoid the
temptation to go overboard by plastering these ads all over your
website and thereby diluting your own primary message/proposition
and confusing your hard earned visitor. When properly used,
these ads are just ancillary or complementary content that you
are providing to enhance the information and opportunities that
you are providing to your visitor…if something happens to
strike a responsive chord with your visitor, you might make a
little pay per click money.

If properly used, these propagation programs can result in the
classical “win-win” situation. However, if you over do it, this
can quickly turn into a loss for you (the individual webmaster)
and a win for your pay per click partners that are distributing
the ads. As in many things, moderation is important.

The dynamic search engine marketing industry continues to evolve
as users began to take advantage of the steady stream of new
features, tools and innovations provided by the ever increasing
number of search engines offering quality search results (it’s
not all about Google anymore). The evolutionary time line for
Internet marketing continues to run at warp speed.

An example of previous evolutionary periods (which by now may
almost seem prehistoric) would be the emergence of pay-per-click
advertising and the cooresponding rise of search-marketing firms
specializing in AdWords and Overture. As long as there are methods
for finding and retrieving information in digital databases by
using keywords or similar attributes, there will be a
search-marketing industry. How that industry operates in the
future depends on how the search engines operate and how consumer
tendencies evolve.

It’s a constant sea of change, but the good things just keep on
getting better! Stay alert, and light on your feet, and the
opportunities will just keep on coming your way.

The above are just some observations from “the peanut gallery”,
but I don’t think I’m far off the mark about where things are
heading. With that, I’m off the soapbox and wishing you
success in whatever you do online!

Kirk Bannerman operates his own successful home based business
and also coaches others seeking to start their own home based
business. For more information visit his website at Proven Work At Home Business

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Do people that are successful in home based businesses share
some common characteristics and, if so, what are the primary
ones?

The dictionary defines successful as:

*having a favorable outcome, or

*having obtained something desired or intended, or

*having achieved wealth or eminence

When applied to a home business, I think the definition of the
word successful involves a combination of financial gain, time
flexibility, and being able to call your own shots (being your
own boss). The order of importance will vary from person to
person.

I have had the good fortune to be quite successful with
home-based internet businesses. No, that is not completely
accurate, I have had success because I have invested a lot of
sweat equity in my work at home business activities.

Having spent many years in the corporate world, I am a firm
believer in the team aspect of business and so I naturally
gravitated toward network marketing instead of trying to go
solo selling products/services and competing with the big players
like Yahoo, Amazon and the other well known names.

After doing considerable research, I found a very well
established and financially solid internet-based company to work
with. Using my business experience in the “offline world” and
developing my internet marketing skills on the fly in an OJT
(aka: on-the-job-training) format, things have gone very well and
I recently spent some time trying to identify some of the primary
traits that are common in my most successful team members.

Whether you’re breeding bird dogs, or race horses, or drafting
college football players to play in the NFL…it’s important to
develop “markers” that can be very useful in predicting success.
From my offline, traditional, business experience I have known
this from the get-go, but for some reason I was slow to learn
(or, was it re-learn?) that identifying the people with a high
likelihood of success is even more important when developing an
online network marketing business that depends upon teamwork.

Reflecting back on many of the truly successful people I have
worked with in network marketing, I made a list of the numerous
success factors that emerged when I assessed each person
individually. After compiling the list, three factors seemed to
stand out as being the most common success indicators. In no
particular order, these factors were:

*approaching the business with a long term perspective. It often takes a long time to become an “overnight success”

*exhibiting the tenacity of a pit bull

*being able to ride the emotional roller coaster (two steps forward and one step back) in the early stages of developing the business

Just because a person has these characteristics, it does not
ensure success and, on the flip side, a person is not necessarily
doomed to failure just because he or she does not possess all
three of them.

Kirk Bannerman operates his own successful home based business and also coaches others seeking to start their own home based business. For more information visit his website at
Proven Work At Home Business

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