Plan for Home Business Online Success
If you are marketing your home business online, you need to have a plan to improve your odds of success. On the Internet, you are literally competing against the world, so no matter your product you are likely to find someone selling something similar.
The first thing you need to do is choose your niche. Your niche defines who you are going to market to. Women ages 20-40 is too broad for most purposes; you are better off choosing women ages 20-40 with small children and an interest in gardening. Obviously, your product has to appeal to your niche, but using a niche makes your targeting easier.
Your website should look professional. If you use a host such as SiteSell you can save the cost of a website designer (often in the $100-1000s, plus updates) and do everything yourself, or you can use a less expensive host and do all your design on your own using products such as Dreamweaver, and get royalty free photos from sites such as iStockPhoto. Do not overdo on the graphics or use anything that requires a shopper to download special software; you'll only annoy them.
Your copy should be well written. Remember the cardinal rule of copywriting and emphasize benefits, not features. Try not to sound gimmicky either; another great way to offend that is all too common online. Check your spelling and grammar too.
Accept online payments. Who wants to possibly have to disconnect a dialup connection to place an order? You are also best off taking more than just PayPal, which many view as unprofessional.
Learn at least a little about search engine optimization. You don't have to master it, and you may want to consider hiring a company to do the optimization for you, but you need to know what to watch out for. There are things that you can do or have done to your website by a SEO company that will get you banned from the search engines, so know at least enough to protect yourself.
Use WordTracker to find good keywords to target in your search engine optimization efforts. This tool, which has a free trial, lets you type in a keyword or phrase and find out what similar terms have been searched for on major search engines.
Have a solid pay per click strategy in place. Google AdWords is one of the best, and if you use tactics from ebooks such as Google Cash, you can pay very little for this form of advertising.
Find other websites that your target audience may visit and advertise there. Write articles and submit them to article directories and to the websites themselves, particularly if there is a newsletter.
Keep learning about what's happening, both in your business and on the Internet. If you can spot new trends you are likely to keep ahead of the competition.
See also:
Useful Resources:
WordTracker
Google Cash
The Search Engine Institute
SiteSell
Hemera
Del.icio.us 
Furl 
Reddit 
Simpy 
Spurl 
Y! MyWeb
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