by Russell Marsh

[Russell brings up some key points for small business Internet marketing and individual Internet marketing here.  To succeed, you need to focus, persist, and have discipline.  Working from home is, indeed solitary and can become repetitious, so you need to factor things into you life to deal with problems Internet marketers face.  The article does not tell you how to succeed in online business, but it does give you the steps to take to avoid failure in online business ventures.  Gren. Bingham] 

The Dream of Internet Marketing from home sounds great but there are three things working against you and you have top guard against them. The first thing is working on your own, the second is the temptation to jump from one program to the next and the third the constant bombardment of new products and the temptations they provide. How are you to overcome these distractions?

You need some Discipline

If you are to work from home it is going to take some serious discipline if you are to make your business a success. You have to decide when to work. You have to make sure you don’t get lazy and waste a morning or an afternoon here and there. Always be determined to get up away from the TV and do something constructive for your business.

It can be lonely working at home on your own. Be sure to control your time effectively and with discipline. You need to remain productive within your scheduled work hours.

It also takes self-discipline to not spend hours going over e-mails instead of working. It is recommended that you limit the number of e-mail lists you join. Why subscribe to 50 e-mail lists and then have to spend two hours wading through your inbox deleting all those e-mails?

Signing up for two or three e-mail lists should be enough. Limit it to the experts you really want to hear from. Or better yet, subscribe to their RSS feeds.

Products are being released every day, each one of them claiming to be the next millionaire maker. Be very careful in your assessment of these products and only buy something you think may make an amazing difference to your business.

Having said that about new products if you see one that could save you some hours, then give it careful consideration. Time is valuable to you and if you become more efficient by investing in a tool (or a service) that automates something then this could be a wise investment.

Always watch out for glowing reports and testimonials. Quite often these people are affiliates of the product and you need to sure they are not this but genuine users. Don’t forget it’s a Tool you are considering. You wouldn’t buy a new hammer unless your old one was broken so treat your home business the same way.

Stay on Focus

A proper business plan is essential to make sure you stay focused and therefore to your success and to keep distractions at bay so devote some time to making one initially then make sure that you do NOT deviate from it.

If, after a reasonable amount of effort and time you find that your program or project is not working out for you the it may be time to consign it to the failed enterprises folder. Not everything works and there will be some casualties along the way. Make sure you’re not giving up on something just because something else looks new and exciting though. Do this once and you could be business hopping forever.

To avoid becoming bored with some of the more routine tasks you will have to perform change your routine around a little after a period of time. Write a new schedule so you change the order of tasks around. We all need a little variety from time to time. Why not network with other home business owners from time to time? You could pick up some good advice for free.

Be aware that it may take a while before you have your business plan sufficiently fluid that you can maintain your business tasks without it becoming tedious. Constantly monitor your plan and tweak it rather than abandon it at the first sign of boredom. Don’t dump a perfectly good plan for the sake of a couple of tweaks.

About the Author:

Russell is associated with CarbonCopyPRO. Russell’s website is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Working from Home. See his FREE Website offer there. Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service

by Mark Thompson

[As usual Mark is spot on about what is needed to build a profitable website.  He might call it six steps to online business success.  I can't emphasise too strongly his point about planning your website using a piece of paper, sketch your website design from both a customer viewing perspective and a business flow perspecitve.  Also take time to understand your customer, there can be a potential market that has no demand for the product.  Read on, take note, succeed!  Gren. Bingham]

 When it comes to building a profitable website you need to plan and prepare first. Far too many people will have an idea for a particular type of website and then straight away buy the domain name and then start to build it without actually thinking through what it is they need to do. Just like these people I would build hundreds of websites and then spend time constantly moving from one to the next without any real plans in place. However today I have learn that it is much better to concentrate on have no more than 20 sites and because of this I have seen my income dramatically increase.

There are 6 steps you should take to ensure that you create websites that are profitable. Stick to this formula and you’ll rapidly increase you income. Before you even think about building a site get yourself a ring binder and some paper you should create a section for each site you want to create. You could do this on a PC but trust me on this you’ll use it much more if it’s in a folder next to you PC.

The first step is to carry out Keyword Research. It is at this stage you will need to think about the niches and the sections that you will need to have. The niche you choose can be on any subject that you want, and as you will soon discover there are many niches which also have very profitable sub niches which you may wish to explore. Although Cars as your niche website would be good one about SUV’s as a sub niche or even one on carburretors would be much more beneficial. The most important thing to remember about keyword research is that you need to find a good mix of keywords. Look for those which have very little competition against them and look for those that will provide you with a challenge when it comes to promoting your site.

The next step when it comes to creating and building a profitable website is planning. A lot of people forget about this stage and completely miss it out, you shouldn’t. So you now need to get a piece of paper from your folder and jot down what the different areas of your site are going to be. It is during this time you need to decide just how you want your site to look and whether you want to have sub directories within it or just have separate sections within the site. Just by jotting down a few things and keeping a note of these will help you in the future as you will be able to see immediately what site models you have used previously work well and which ones haven’t.

The building stage comes next. In the planning stage you should have decided what tool you are going to use to build your site. There are many available some are free others cost hundreds of dollars. If you are just starting out I would suggest using Wordpress as it’s free and can be easily installed from many websites Cpanel.

Promotion is the bit where many people fall down. They do enough to get the site indexed but then they get bored and build a new site. STOP! You must promote your site good promotion should be ongoing. Try to spend an hour a day for at least 2 weeks promoting your site.

A site will only survive if it receives traffic. The traffic it receives will come from a number of different sources. But in order for the traffic to know about the site you need to promote it properly. The more properly a site is promoted the more chances are that you will start to receive traffic from search engines. This kind of organic search traffic is completely free and is what any good website owner should be striving to achieve.

For many webmasters monetization is their main objective in order that they can earn an income from their sites. But the trouble is that most of them will monetize their sites too early. Instead what I prefer to do after building mine is leave them alone for about 3 months before actually monetizing them. There is no real reason to immediately add Adsense to any sites you build as it may well affect your sites ranking and without traffic being directed towards it you are unlikely to make any money from it.

If you start to incorporate the these 6 basic steps into your site building routine you soon start to see the benefit. Along with the increased profits you find the confidence to take on bigger and more profitable projects.

About the Author:

If you would like to find out more about building profitable websites check out Profitable Website Guides. Mark Thompson is a full time internet entrepeneur and runs The Income Academy