I took the weekend off (3 day weekend) to celebrate Independence Day and enjoy being with family and friends. It was great to just put business aside and relax and enjoy myself. The fireworks show in State College at Beaver Stadium was amazing; one of the top ranked shows in the nation. It was a blast… no pun intended.

I took pictures throughout the show along with a 40 second video of the finale. If you would like to check them out, just add me as a friend on Facebook. Otherwise, one of the pictures I took is to the right.

As much fun as I had, it’s time to get back into the swing of things. June was a rather busy month, and I’m excited to see just how many posts I had last month. If you happened to miss any of them, you can find them below…

June Comment Contest – Win Cash and Prizes!

An Unforeseen “Benefit” of 3-Way Link Exchanges

It’s Official – Alan Mater is an EzineArticles.com Expert Author

How Blogging About Internet Marketing Can Make You Money Online

New Blog Theme – I’m Using the FlexSqueeze Wordpress Theme

Why You Should Incorporate Exercise Into Your Work From Home Routine

May 2010 Income Report

Why Good Keyword Selection is Essential for Home-Based Business Success

What a Man, a Dog and a Leash Have to do with Internet Marketing

Transcription Crash Course Review – Become a Home Transcriptionist Today

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This is a guest post by Sam Bakker. If you would like to guest post on this blog, please Contact me.

When I first started my own home-based business a few years ago, I thought that no matter what my first home business website would work. I thought I had everything important in place and the website was looking great. But the reality of my situation had to sink in eventually; even though I had an excellent website, and what I thought was successful home business information I was missing visitors, rendering my online presence useless.

Two years later, I took a second look, but this time with a careful look at all options. I would learn about Search Engine Optimization and how it can influence a business. Through it, I was able to add life to my websites as well as a sizeable amount of money.

If your website is currently suffering from a lack of visitors, the first place to look for answers is your website’s keywords and their search engine performance. Often we can build links for our website, writing content with the intention of ranking it. But none of that will matter if you don’t have the right keywords. There is a lot of money to be made in internet marketing if this step is taken seriously.

First of all, check the keywords you decided to compete for when you started your campaign. Review their usefulness and relative competition. Once you have done so, visit Google’s Adwords Keywords tool or use WordTracker. These tools will help you see clearly where opportunities in your niche could be for keywords.

If you are able to find some additional keywords that you should be ranking your website for, construct a plan outlining what on-page and off-page content will need to be produced. This is to get your website appearing on the front page for that term. Once your plan has been completed, stay focused on the job at hand. To rank higher in the search engines, you need to be consistently taking action.

As internet marketers, we often get excited and dive into projects without spending enough time working through our foundations. Looking for keywords is an essential step; a website cannot succeed in the search engines without it. Make sure you take the time to review your website’s keywords and take action if necessary so that your website doesn’t stay hidden from your potential customers.

About the Author: Sam Bakker has been in the internet marketing industry for the past 7 years. If you would like to find out more about Sam or learn some free internet marketing tips then you can visit his website at SamBakker.com

The following is a guest post by Sam Bakker…

I recall when I first started trying to use blogging to make money online. I had arrived at the entrance of a cyber metropolis armed with an idea and a daft look on my face. It was a multifaceted space teeming with online users, all I had to do was establish myself and I’d be crowded with customers in no time. I had bought a product that would teach me how to build a home-based business. It told me I should start a blog and begin sharing with the rest of the internet world how to be successful making money through a home-based business.

I opened an account with Blogger.com and put my hands to the keyboard. For two months I typed away, completing a design and posting content up on a daily basis. For all this effort, I had one member and no sign of traffic. My blog was floating around in an alleyway when I wanted it to be across the street from Facebook. I wasn’t making money and my website wasn’t going anywhere.

It wasn’t until a year later that I found out (and corrected) what I had done wrong. In this article today, I am going to discuss what mistakes I made in my first attempt to make money blogging online and how you can avoid them. By dodging these classic mistakes, your journey to success will help you obtain an internet marketing lifestyle that is greatly to your advantage.

Firstly, it must be said that before anything else, you must plan out what your blog’s central focus will be. As is the general nature of entrepreneurs, we get an idea and jump in head-first without planting a base for ourselves. Planning is essential especially when it comes to blogging; you not only need to identify your audience and the value you can offer them, but you also need to find effective keywords.

Keywords are the driving force behind a blog’s organic search engine traffic. You need to find the most effective ones using a tool such as “Google Adwords Keywords” to research. This will show you where you can get your search engine traffic from and what terms will be most profitable when it comes to making money. If you launch your blog without keywords in mind, often Google will struggle to place you in the index. Much of the time this means that your blog’s potential is capped very early on and your chance of getting decent traffic flow from Google is reduced. Be sure that you conduct the appropriate keyword research for your website before buying your domain name.

When you first launch your blog online, it feels great. However, now the challenge is in getting it seen. In order for search engines to rank your website based on targeted key terms, you will need to generate some external links back to your website. Use websites such as Ezine Articles, Squidoo and write for other websites in your niche to get your blog rising in the search engines and producing traffic.

Use these tips to ensure that your blog doesn’t end up like my first one, gathering dust along some forgotten nook in cyberspace. Instead, implement the techniques I have discussed with you here to get your blog off to an excellent start.

Sam Bakker has been making money online for the past 7 years. If you would like to find out more about Sam Bakker or internet marketing you can view Sam’s website at SamBakker.com

Do you suffer from information overload? When i was first learning internet marketing, I was presented with so much information that I couldn’t make any sense of it. I felt even more dumb about the concept than before. You could say I suffered from information overload syndrome.

This occurrence happens quite frequently among people. There are ways to avoid this from happening to you so you don’t feel lost and confused. If you’re looking to start your own home based business and learn how to market and advertise, there’s a lot of information to sift through. Even in the corporate business world, this is a huge problem.

Dealing with a lot of information all at once can be a nightmare. It can literally make your head spin, and you’re left wondering where to even start. Here’s what I did to combat my information overload problem and how you can do the same.

Tips to prevent information overload:

• Take a deep breath and relax
• Take a break (as long as you need) and let your mind sort through the information you just read. Go back later to anything that still doesn’t make sense.
• Evaluate where you are right now, and where you want to be
• Set small goals for yourself, utilizing only the pertinent information to reach those goals
• Tackle only one project at a time (this tip is a lifesaver!)

These tips are geared more towards entrepreneurs looking to work from home who are faced with heaps of information right from the start. Of course, these tips can be applied to any individual, but they should be tailored specifically to your needs.

The other option is to not do anything about your information overload problem, in which case you could end up like the people in this video…

Many Australian families with children of school age often find it challenging to balance work and family life. Many employers demand strict adherence to the firm’s hours. When a child gets ill at school, for example, the mum must leave work and bring the child home. You may have found yourself in this type of dilemma before and know how frustrating it can be.

This need for flexibility can be viewed in broader terms as a desire to gain personal freedom. The most alluring aspect of starting a home based business is the opportunity to gain control over your own life. As a home-based business owner you can shape your work life around your own goals. There are no bosses to follow, no corporate cultures to live by and no rigid work schedules. If you enjoy getting up early, you can start work early and finish early. If you enjoy getting up late, you can start your workday later and finish later. You have the freedom to work and earn as you choose.

A Home-Based Business Can Save You Time

You can gain financial and time benefits by working from home. Just think of the time and transportation costs you can save by not having to commute to an office each day. Even if you commute half an hour each way to and from work, it adds up to 5 hours each week, or 250 hours each year. You probably can find much better ways to use this time. If you now drive to work, you can eventually save thousands of dollars by reducing the amount you spend on gas and car maintenance costs by starting a home based business.

A Home-Based Business Can Be Beneficial for Family Relationships

Many decide to start home-based businesses to strengthen family relationships. Most parents have to work full time just to provide for their families. They don’t have the time to enjoy parenthood. Home-based businesses makes it possible for parents to enjoy parenting. Husbands and wives can help each other with various parts of the business while older children can also be directly involved. Even younger children gain from seeing how business is conducted. Children learn about working together as a team and goal setting, which often isn’t taught in their schools. A home business can be an important part of the child’s education and help build stronger family bonds.

A Home-Based Business Can Reduce Stress

Many Australians have chosen to start home businesses to reduce stress. Much of the stress today is caused by the attempt to juggle work and family commitments. With your own home business you can stay at home to care for a sick child, or older relative. You can prepare and share dinner with your family without feeling rushed or stressed.

Office politics and personality conflicts are another part of corporate life and are causes of work-related stress. By working from home you can decrease stress by avoiding these politics and personality conflicts. You can also decrease stress by freeing yourself from the deadlines that are imposed on you from above. In addition, having to travel to your work adds stress at the beginning and end of your day. Many people find this to be a highly stressful part of their lives.

Home-based Business Trends

Home-Based Business is becoming more and more popular in the Asia-Pacific region in countries such as Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, The Philippines, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea.

A recent article from NBC News presented several women who operate successful businesses from their homes. The article also showed the government’s positive attitude towards the trend. Several government officials quoted in the publication believe that home based businesses add entrepreneurial vibrancy to the communities in which they are located.

Home-based Businesses are becoming more popular in Australia. In June 2004, there were 282,400 home-based businesses in the state of NSW in Australia. This represented 63.8% of small businesses in New South Wales .

Opportunities for Aussies in Intellect Marketing

Australians around the globe have achieved success and financial freedom through network marketing . The growth of network marketing in Australia is one way to leverage their businesses even further by working with contact back in the Australia.

There has been a huge growth of intellect marketing in Australia. According to the Direct Selling Association of the Australia, direct marketing sales in the Australia are around $500 million per year. Being in the top twenty five direct selling markets, Australia offers considerable opportunity.

Learn More About the Latest Australian Home-Based Business Opportunity?

If you’re interested in creating financial freedom, I would like to discuss this ground floor network marketing opportunity with you. You can leverage your time by working with your friends, family and associates to build a successful network marketing business. Time is of the essence. Contact me now to learn more.

Email: 3822292@usana.com
Website: http://www.ideallifestyle.usana.com

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Income generating alternatives to the ‘nine-to-five job’ are becoming increasingly important in our unstable globalized economy. Many people have successfully diversified their incomes through network marketing.

Why Network Marketing?

Many members of the local community have found that a secure job or career is a thing of the past.

The career and financial uncertainties arising from corporate downsizing has coined terms such as McJob and permatemp. A McJob is a low-paying, low-prestige position requiring few skills and offering little opportunity for advancement. Permatemps are temporary workers who are expected to do the same work as permanent employees but without the benefits or prospect of career advancement.

Network marketing offers individuals an alternative to job insecurity.

Entrepreneurs looking for financial freedom and a better way of life have turned to network marketing. There are many reasons why network marketing offers a viable alternative to working in the corporate world.

First, a direct marketing business can be developed in your spare time while you continue working. Often wives build successful network marketing organizations while their husbands continue to work in the corporate world. Over time, the network marketing business grows large enough to support the whole family. In the meantime, it offers an additional income stream and decreases the risks associated with corporate downsizing.

Second, most direct marketing businesses require little start-up capital. For many organizations, this is less than $300. Starting your own business or buying a franchise can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. (And there’s no guarantee that the business will generate sufficient income to repay the money borrowed). If you’re looking for a company to get started with for less than $30 a month, check out SFI.

Third, direct marketing generates an ongoing stream of residual income. This is especially true for organizations marketing a product that gets used up and needs to be purchased regularly.

Residual Income is the Key to Financial Freedom.

Residual income (also called passive income) is one of the greatest benefits offered by network marketing . This is why Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad and many other publications, highly recommends network marketing in his books.

Kiyosaki writes about ways to develop residual income streams. They include:

• networking marketing
• royalties from patents and copyrighted works
• sales commissions in some industries, e.g. insurance
• rental income from property investment
• dividends from shares

With the exception of network marketing, most of these methods require large amounts of capital, time, or both to generate long-term results.

With a small investment and dedication, network marketing has helped many families take control of their financial destinies by generating a residual income. They have found a solution to corporate downsizing in the form of network marketing.

More importantly, residual income from network marketing can lay the foundation for your future wealth and financial freedom.
Besides the financial benefits, people have found one of the greatest benefits of network marketing is that it can be operated as a home-based business.

Learn More About the Latest Direct Marketing Opportunity?

If you’re interested in creating Financial Freedom, I would like to discuss this ground floor network marketing opportunity with you. You can leverage your time by working with your friends, family and associates to build a successful network marketing business. Time is of the essence. Contact me now to learn more.

Email: 3822292@usana.com
Website: http://www.ideallifestyle.usana.com

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When someone asks, “What do you do for a living?” How do you answer? Do you say, “I work for XYZ Company and have a home based business.” Or do you say “I work from home?” and leave out the day job part or something similar? Or even worse, you fail to mention your home based business at all? If you’re new to Network Marketing/MLM, I’m betting you say you work for XYZ Company and my network marketing company or you fail to mention your business at all.

It’s a hard habit to break. I know it was for me. I went to a Chamber of Commerce Breakfast at Teddy Gentry’s (of the group Alabama) farm a few years ago and as I was introducing myself to people, I noticed myself saying “And.” This thought has stuck with me for all these years as I think about why some people succeed and some fail in Network Marketing. You can look at the success stories and figure out that almost anyone can succeed. There are people who were educated, high school dropouts, executives, factory workers, geniuses, and the not so smart. I even remember reading about a guy who was homeless on the street who succeeded and I’m sure you can find members of the same class of people who failed, so background isn’t the reason. It may be part of the reason but it isn’t the entire reason.

If you sprung up a business on Main Street, it’d be easy to say you own it. After all, chances are that it would be ALL you did. You’d give it 110% of your attention and your time. You’d more than likely be there 10-16 hours a day and think about it all the time until it became successful or you burned out. There are books out there that say you should quit your job so that you’d have no choice but to succeed in your company, but I can’t agree 100%. My belief is that it’s better to have the mindset that your business is #1 and your job is #2 (not including family and other important things).

If you’ve ever worked 2 jobs, you probably didn’t mention both of them when people asked so why mention your job now unless you are at work? Does that make sense? It’s nothing but a mindset, but it’ll make a world of difference in how you act inside and out. If you’re saying you work for XYZ Company and… you’re missing a great opportunity to have someone ask about your business. Would you rather have someone ask how he or she can get a job or have their own business? I know which would be best for you and the person who may be asking. If you’re in a reputable company that provides training and a way to make money, without costing an arm and a leg, and you are supporting your downline, they would be better off in your downline. What about your products? Would they help the person asking?

Would the products save them money? Would (your product) solve (enter problem here)? This isn’t the end all be all success key in network marketing, but it is a very important piece of the puzzle. If you do this, your bank account won’t explode overnight, but it will get you on the path to not having that job.

Read more about leads on line and how to generate leads to increase your income.

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If there’s one thing you need in order to succeed with MLM/Network Marketing, it’s leads. Without leads, you’ll never make much money regardless of your company, the pay plan, your upline or anything else. You’re also going to need a lot of prospects since there’s no way you’ll sign everyone to be an agent. How many you’ll need depends on several factors such as your skill and your business. Not to mention, if you have a lot of leads, you won’t have to feel like you have to sign everyone.

It’s a lot easier to say no to having someone that doesn’t match what you’re looking for if you have 20-30 people waiting on your call. There are other factors involved in succeeding, but if you have leads and use them, that’s a big hurdle passed. Call everyone you know and ask for referrals. Tell them about the great business you have and how they can benefit from either being a customer or agent. If you’ve chosen wisely and believe in your company, you won’t see a problem with this. If you aren’t sure you have a great business, maybe you should keep looking.

A great way to decide if you have a good company is to ask yourself if you’d sign up your best friend or valued member of your family. Or, ask yourself if you’d use the product if there was no pay plan involved. If the answer is No, maybe you should keep looking. Build lead capture pages and get them listed high on search engines. This will generate leads that are interested in your company. However, anyone who has worked at getting a site listed high will tell you this is time consuming and far from easy, and it’s not an overnight job either.

You could spend a lot of time working on your site and never break the top 100. You can advertise your lead capture page on Pay Per Click (PPC) search engines. The largest sites are Google and Yahoo. These are the ads that show up at the top or on the right when you search. This is the quickest way and depending on the key words you’re bidding on could be cheap or very expensive (some keywords cost over 100 bucks) and there’s no guarantee you’ll get a single lead. It only guarantees that someone will see your page.

If you’re going to go this route, do yourself a favor and either get trained on how to do it or start slow or both. You can easily blow hundreds or thousands of dollars before you know it. You can print flyers and post them on bulletin boards around town and put them on doors and cars. If you figure a 1-2% success rate, you’ll get 1-2 leads per hundred flyers and then depending on your closing rate, you can figure out how many flyers you’ll need to hand out consistently to reach your goals.

Also figure in printing costs. Even if you’re printing these at home, you’ll have to pay for ink/toner and the wear and tear on your printer, not to mention the time and gas it takes to drive around and post the flyers. You should also get permission from property managers if you’re going to put them on doors or cars since some people will throw them on the ground. One other thing to be wary about is car alarms.

You can spam the world with one of those “e-mail 16 million people for 29.95″ spam messages you get every day. Do us both a favor and forget about that. The best you can hope for is to not get blacklisted or in trouble with the feds. The odds are that you’ll be visited by the feds and/or have your ISP shut you down. The way these are collected is by sending a little robot spider to crawl the web and collect e-mail addresses from forums, news groups, blogs, web sites and anywhere else they can find them.

These are just bad news and may get you kicked out of your company since they could be black listed because you didn’t follow this advice. An easy way to tell if they are real leads or harvested is the price. If they’re unbelievably cheap or don’t include i.p. address, they are probably harvested.

Cold Calling – This is just as it sounds. You pick up the phone book and start calling. This is the cheapest way to generate leads and if you have a thick skin may work for you. The thing to remember is that those people may be on the Do Not Call List and it may get you in trouble. The best thing to do is research the legal requirements before attempting this.

You can buy leads from a company that generates leads for you. But even these aren’t created equal. Some companies sell the same lead to 5, 10 or more people; even people in the same company as you and sell them for weeks, months or longer. You could end up with a lead that is 5 months old and been called by 10 or more people and is just plain tired of talking to people or has already joined a company and is quite happy with it.

Some are also overpriced and use shady tactics to get people to sign up such as contest sites. Or you could join a lead Co-Op that only sells the lead to you and generates it after you order meaning they are about 1-3 days old and only sold once. You want to make sure the company is reputable, been around for awhile and truly cares about their customers/members. They should offer multiple lead packages, training on how to effectively contact those leads, multiple autoresponders to make contacting them for follow-up (the fortune is in the follow-up) and training them easier and a presentation to explain what network marketing/MLM actually is in case the person has never heard of the concept or your company doesn’t offer a recruiting site.

It would also help if the company has a pay plan so that as you refer your new downline to the great leads you use, you can create an extra income stream (or at least get them for free) and so can your downline.

The thing to remember is that regardless of how the prospect was generated these people asked for information on starting a home based business and you should make it your responsibility to get them the information as soon as possible. Unless you didn’t take my advice and used a spam CD; then you’re on your own. Another thing to think about when choosing a method is will it be duplicatable to your downline and get consistent results? But that’s a subject covered in a previous article.

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One way that people choose to make money from home is through a home based business. There are many reasons that this choice is one that makes sense. It offers the owner many options that may not be present in all work from home jobs.

An advantage of having your own business is that of choices. You can turn a lot of things into a business. All that’s needed is a strong consumer demand for your service or product. It’s very possible to take an ability or talent you possess and turn it into a viable home based business. Begin with doing some research to assess the demand for it.

Once you have hit on the perfect product or service to offer, your next step should be figuring out just how much it will cost you out of pocket to get things started. This can be anywhere from very little to having to get a small business loan. It completely depends on what your business is going to be. For example, if you want to begin a house cleaning service, your initial financial outlay will most likely not be a lot.

Examples of home based business could be domestic help. After all you already clean your own house so there are probably already a lot of needed supplies on hand for this work from home based business. As you take on more clients, your inventory can be upgraded but, by then, you’ll have the money to do it.

Something you should keep in mind is that when running a home based business you forego a lot of the overhead that public businesses incur. You don’t have to pay rental fees on an office, for one thing although you will probably want to get a second line installed for business use. Everything you need is right in your home office. There are certain things you must pay for each month, anyway, and while some of these expenses may increase marginally, you won’t be paying them for 2 different places. That is certainly a real benefit of having a home based business.

It is better if you have a room in your home to devote to office space. In that way, the rest of your house remains yours and there is little notice that you actually are running a business out of your home. If you have small children, it’s even better to be able to keep work related items in a separate room so that little hands don’t destroy something, or cause harm to themselves.

When you feel you’re ready to take the plunge, don’t hesitate to ask for advice or guidance from others who are traveling this path. With the right idea, a little ingenuity, commitment, and dedication, you CAN make this work!

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