Recently I’ve been feeling rather popular on one of my sites. It’s been getting calls from people wanting to advertise on it. While I haven’t accepted every offer, it’s been quite an interesting experience.

Getting calls is not something I’m really set up for, but then I don’t really deal with customers by telephone anyhow. But if I did want to get more professional, I’d have to either get a separate line with answering machine or a telephone answering service.

The two options are rather interesting, certainly. The We Answer answering service could certainly have advantages, for example. While I really don’t think I’m getting nearly enough calls to worry about it, having such a service would mean people could talk to a real person. Given how easy it is for messages to go astray with two children in the house, that’s not a bad thing.

Then again, at my level an answering machine out of kids’ reach would probably do the job.

I could see this being useful if you’re selling your own products. Taking care of customers can be a bit of an issue, especially if they aren’t worried about time zones. With an answering service, you won’t have the phone ringing at times you’d rather be asleep. And you can choose how your calls are handled for you.

While this is above and beyond the average home business person’s needs, it’s an interesting option for those who do want to grow their business to include more customer service.

Home business owners have a lot of options for what they want to do. They can run fairly traditional businesses out of their homes, such as network marketing, daycare or bookkeeping, or they can use their skills in the newer businesses the Internet has made available, such as website design, virtual assistants and affiliate marketers.

However, you can combine affiliate marketing with many of these opportunities. It’s a way you can offer the most complete options to the customers you come into contact with.

A website designer, for example, may offer hosting or can simply recommend hosting through various companies, and be paid for referring the customers. A network marketer can offer products and services that are related to what he or she is selling, but aren’t available through the network marketing company.

All you have to do is think about what more you can offer your existing client base. There are probably plenty of items that are related to the things they trust you on anyhow that you could recommend and earn money through the affiliate program. Read the rest of this entry »

Your blog isn’t much if you don’t have readers. Sure, you can post, ping and all that, but it can be more difficult than that to get traffic.

Submitting your site to a blog directory is one idea. Most don’t get or send a lot of traffic. Even so, you want to submit to a good directory, if you do indeed submit to them at all. The Alive blog directory is a new addition to the toolbar PR6 Alive directory. While it doesn’t have any PR itself yet, it appears the owners will be promoting it, so it could provide good links in the future.

Only you can decide if it’s worth the annual or one time fee for a listing in a paid directory such as this one, or if the free ones are the only ones that are the right price for you.

Most of the time I love having a home business. It’s fun and challenging. But sometimes burnout strikes.

This particular bout has little enough to do with my business in a lot of ways. It has a lot more to do with frustration with all the getting ready for my sister’s upcoming wedding. All the preparation work has taken so much time (I’m a bridesmaid), and often I’m just wiped out by the time I can sit and work.

Add in a daughter starting kindergarten and a son going into speech therapy, and distractions abound. It’s hard to be motivated when you’re tired. Much easier to kick back and mess around on the computer than actually work.

But to keep a home business going, you have to get work done.

One of the things that helps me most is to have definite goals for the day. When I’ve had a lot of things to do outside the home, I minimize the business goals, but I do often have some, even if it’s just taking a little forum time or writing a single article.

Also take time for you, to ease the frustration. My current schedule has required far too much time out and about for my tastes in business, but it’s been fun on its own level. Then again, it has reminded me why I hate shoe shopping so much. Finally had to buy the shoes for my dress online, thank you very much.

I’m most productive when I have no one, NO ONE, around me. This is hard to get in my home, and if I’m feeling frustrated it’s what I absolutely need in order to work. So sometimes I have to ask for the time I need to work. One of the challenges of not having the room for a home office with a door.

Any time you start feeling burnt out, start thinking about what’s causing it. You can get past it; you just need to figure out what the root cause is and get yourself going all over again.

Technorati Tags: home business burnout, burn out, burnout, tired of working, work at home business

eBay has perhaps the greatest collection of niche markets online. You can find the hottest and some of the most obscure items for sale on their site. It’s pretty amazing to wander through.

There are a lot of ways affiliates can take advantage of this. For one thing, in many niches they have something that will be attractive to your visitors. You can have a bit of fun and point out unusual auctions or some of the great deals available.

AuctionAds has gotten a lot of press. It’s one of the easiest ways to add eBay auctions to an existing site. You just tell it the keywords, and it sets up the ads for you. All you have to do is plug in the code, which is a bit of JavaScript.

Some people have had great success with AuctionAds. It can perform AdSense on some sites. Other sites don’t do so well. That is, of course, why you need to test everything.

Here’s a working ad from AuctionAds:

The keyword I chose was “home office desk”. How does it look to you?

Another popular option is BANS, or Build a Niche Store. This software helps you to build a search engine friendly niche store, using eBay to stock it. The software allows you to add relevant content to your niche. The site even shows you 30 real, working stores so that you can see what people have done with it.

Obviously, each of these has very different uses. But either can be used to add to an existing site. AuctionAds only works on existing pages, of course, while BANS is best for creating new pages. And yes, you can use it on unlimited sites and domains. No need for multiple licenses.

Just explore eBay. You may find a new niche you could enjoy marketing for, even if you don’t choose the eBay route to market it.

Technorati Tags: ebay, niche marketing, affiliates, affiliate sites, auctionads

Just one of those days. OK, one of those days for the past few days, and that’s why I haven’t been posting much. A sheer lack of ideas. Sitting around playing with StumbleUpon, hoping for inspiration.

Gaah! Some days it is really hard to come up with inspiration.

This is especially true if you’re just plain tired. Not in the mood for research. It’s a lot easier to come up with blogging ideas when you aren’t tired.

So let’s call that idea #1: Get some rest.

But sometimes life won’t let you get rest, and that’s my situation. So I have to come up with ideas anyhow now. So let’s call blogging about how you’re coping with a situation in your life idea #2.

Of course, gripe posts only take you so far. They really aren’t a lot of fun to read unless you can make them funny. So let’s call finding a funny take on your situation and how it relates to your blog topic idea #3.

Of course, the whole point of this post is that I’m tired and really not inspired. So three is it. You’re not getting any more ideas unless you give them to me. Got any?

Uh, oh… is that idea #4, ask your readers for ideas?

I need rest.

Technorati Tags: i need rest, tired, blogging ideas

I’ve seen on ProBlogger and a few other sites that there’s going to be a Blog Action Day coming up on October 15. Participating bloggers will be posting about the environment.

Now you may be concerned that your blog has nothing to do with the environment. And that’s where you could well be wrong.

Let’s take this blog as an example. Home business isn’t exactly a topic related to the environment. But there are environmental topics that are quite relevant.

• How to make your home business more environmentally friendly.
• Finding green office supplies.
• Using less electricity in your home business.
• Green marketing
• and so forth.

It’s a great topic and an interesting idea. I’ve signed up a couple of my blogs and hope some ofyou do the same.

Technorati Tags: blog action day, environment

There’s a lot to running a quality site. You may feel that content is king, but without traffic, King Content is going to be mighty lonely. Not to mention how empty the Royal Treasury will be.

You need serfs… err, traffic! And that means you need to market your site.

This can be difficult for some people, easy for others. Of course, creating content is easy for some, tough for others. It just depends on your skill set and interests. For me, creating content is more fun than marketing. But I still try to spend time on marketing.

Article marketing is a favorite area of mine. Done well it can be highly effective. But people debate whether submitting to a lot of directories or just a few select ones plus selected publishers works better. It can very much depend on the amount of time you are willing to spend. I personally use Article Marketer because they submit to the directories that I consider most important, including Ezine Articles. Read the rest of this entry »