The Best Advice About Starting An Online Home Based Business
Just google the phrase "get rich quick" and pick one site among those in the first page. Visit the site and sign on. Pay the membership fee required, if any, and follow the instructions given to you to a T. Pretty soon, probably within weeks, sometimes a month or two, you will be rich and have an online home based business to boot.
Okay, that's possibly the worst advice anyone could give you. I actually threw that in just for the fun of it. :) And to get you thinking - not all advice are created equal.
But seriously, what is the best advice that I can give you? What is that one piece of advice, above all others, that can give you a great start in starting and running a successful online home based business?
Get a Good Mentor
Pretty good advice. No point reinventing the wheel, right? Just find somebody who's been there and done that and you're good.
An added bonus would be somebody who is friendly and patient enough to answer your stupid questions without rolling her eyes. :)
Great Content
Nobody can argue with that. Web surfers might not be the most intelligent bunch of people you can find, but I'm going to bet my bottom dollar that they can smell crap content a mile away. They have millions of other sites to choose from, so really, anything other than great content is just not going to cut it.
The Money is in the List
A mailing list of targeted prospects is a great asset to any home based business. It is like having your cake and eating it. Every time you create or find a new product, just send out an email and you have people queuing up to buy your product.
Of course it is not as simple as that. A lot of effort will probably be spent in the building and maintaining of the list. But when done well, a good list is like money in the bank.
Conclusion
So, what really is the advice that is so valuable that it is the best advice that I can give you. Okay. listen up. The best advice I can give you is:
"Don't listen to me, or anybody else for that matter."
Let me explain. For every advice about home based business that you can find, you will be able to find a "counter" advice.
For example, article marketing is the best way for you to gain exposure for your business, so says a lot of people. Look around and you will find somebody else saying that SEO would be a better way to go.
Some people will say that while the money may be in the list, the time, expense and effort spent in building and maintaining the list is enormous. It is more productive for you to spend the time, money and effort into building niche sites and attracting organic traffic to them. The traffic will be there for years to come and is as good as a list.
And I can go on.
The advice that you get out there is generic, run-of-the-mill advice. It has probably made somebody, somewhere a lot of money. The question you should ask is whether it is suitable for you and your site.
Take article marketing. You have to write at least a few articles a day (the advice usually given is to write a few articles an hour!), and submit them to article directories. After a few hundred articles you will be getting traffic and making good money.
The person giving the advice will tell you that anybody can do it but I beg to differ. I doubt that just anybody can write a few articles a day that is of sufficient quality that a web surfer will want to visit the writer's site and buy something.
Other advice that you get will concentrate on building relationships with other webmasters, or doing some technical stuff, or writing as much content as possible, or...the list goes on.
You should assess all advice in the light of your business, your skills, your interests and your passion. Just because somebody has made good money selling trinkets on eBay does not mean that you should or can do it.
Your online home based business is about you, your website and your business. By all means listen and learn from all the advice that you get out there. But at the end of it all, it is just advice. You and you alone will have to decide how to put it all together for a successful business.
David Lim is the webmaster of QuittingYourJob.com , a site offering information, advice and resources for a newbie looking to start an online home-based business. Probably the best thing about this site is that it tells it like it is, without any of the hype that is so typical in other similar sites.
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