New School Networkers

How’s that killer idea you’ve been thinking about for years coming along? I hope you haven’t waited only to discover someone else beat you to it by building a business online. That’s the worst feeling in the world!

So, if you’re like me and someone hasn’t already snatched your idea, the itch to build a business online keeps clawing your brain.

For that reason, I decided now is the perfect time to take the leap and launch a product idea, after waiting 20+ years to bring it to life.

Since this is my 6^th start-up business, I have volumes of trial and error successes I’ve learned along the way. I’ve been very fortunate with my track record and can count a sale to a Fortune 500 Company as one of my star records.

The facts are there is no education for becoming an entrepreneur. That means the learning curve is steep. And the risk is great. It is not something everyone feels comfortable doing.

So for that reason, I documented the informed steps I took to get my product launched. I hope it takes years off of your learn curve for building businesses online.

1. Free your creativity: If you don’t already have a killer concept, begin creating your “eureka” moment by thinking of things that excite your passion. Remember your new business will take your full time and concentration; it has to be something to enjoy doing. If you’re stumped for ideas, but still have that gnawing to do your own thing, check out Gary Vaynerchuk’s book, “Crush It!” Vaynerchuk sees opportunities everywhere and shares them in his book. It’s tasty.
2. Research and Research Again: Learn the market, research your competition, research patent and trademark options to determine the marketability of your product. Name your target market. What age, income, interests categorize them? Where do these people gather? Create an avatar of your customer so you know how he/she thinks. What are their problems? How does your product solve their problems? The more you know your market and your customer the better marketer you will be.

(P.S. Research your dot com options. I discovered how many people are buying domain names for resale purposes. For example, our new product is organic and our choices for product names were significantly diminished, because people are buying everything related to the organic market trend. For that reason, we also consulted a trademark attorney to insure our name was not in conflict with another product in the same category. Beware: if you skip this step you might run into legal problems, and be forced to change your name after you introduce your product. Don’t take the chance.)

       3.  Path: Will you sell your product/service strictly online or sold through retail options, too? If you create a physical product, learn the pros and cons of licensing vs. manufacturing. If you become a manufacturer, research co-packers, fulfillment centers to create and drop ship your products. We are currently using a co-packer to pack and fulfill our products, instead of actually setting up a manufacturing facility. The downside of this is the upfront costs for required minimal runs. Many manufacturers require a commitment for large batches of product, which is expensive and can cause you to sit on your inventory for a long period of time. (As an aside, when we started our original manufacturing company twenty years ago, we literally started it in our kitchens and then moved to warehouse quarters as the company grew.)

       4.  Funding: Many start-up resources come from family and friends, who believe in your product or concept. However, there are free-funding opportunities now if your idea captures a wide audience. (For our first start-up cash I borrowed student loan money. The lucky thing is that the company was very successful, so it proved to be a great idea for the time.)

a.  Crowdfunding sites, such as Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and RocketHub are becoming increasingly popular, because they help entrepreneurs raise small amounts of money for large pools of investors. For example, one business set a record in December 2010 by raising almost $1 million from more than 13,5000 backers.

b.  SBA (Small Business Administration) Loans are options many business people explore; however, the downside is these loans take months and mountains of paperwork to secure. But risk-adverse banks like the fact these loans are guaranteed by the government by as much as 85%. (We’ve been through the SBA process twice and both times it took almost 9 months to get results. The downside is the fact the paperwork distracts you form your business. So, if ultimately the SBA turns you down, it’s very difficult to rebound from the lost time and negativity it injects into your business. (However, it is a good option if you have a lot of assets. BTW they will ask for our arm and leg to guarantee the loan.)

c.  Because bank loans have been sharply cut to small business in the current economic climate, community banks are better equipped for handling small business underwriting.

d.  Angel-Investors are high-net worth individuals who help fund start-ups in exchange for a percentage of the company. If you have a product or concept with wide appeal and marketability, especially in the tech field, it might be an option to explore.

e.  Venture Capital Firms invest in high-growth companies in the early stage in exchange for a portion of the company. You must hone your story and product to attract these investments. The number of dollars invested by these firms is flat now due to the international economic crisis.

f.  Rolling over your retirement savings to fund a business, without penalty, is becoming an option many people are considering. However, the risk is high with a 95% failure rate for new businesses.  The option to tap retirement savings should be gravely considered before jumping into this type of financing.

g.  Asset-back Loans: These are based upon the value of collateral and are becoming more popular in these chaotic times. The loans usually carry a higher interest rate, but businesses are using these for traditional lines of credit.

h.  Design: Create a product with a good design and visualize how the customer will use it. Think about how Steve Jobs carried a prototype of his iPhone in his pocket, only to discover it scratched easily. He immediately set his team on the task of finding a solution to a problem he knew would irritate his customers. Design is critical to customer acceptance. Don’t discount it. Ever.

5.  Protect Your Invention via a patent or trademark. Patents are expensive, so it’s important to make certain your idea is flawless.

6.  Refine Your Product by getting input from your friends and family and future buyers. Do your own mini-market study by testing your product before you launch it.

7.  Determine Your Margins. Run the numbers of your cost of goods vs. your selling price. Each industry has specific margins that will insure a good bottom line profit. For starters use the 3:1 ratio and adjust your pricing accordingly. (3:1=cost to create product, multiplied by 3 = price of product)

8.  Create Your Elevator Pitch: Develop a description of your product or service to be reiterated in 30 seconds or less. Work on your presentation and expand it to communicate your idea to a broader audience of investors.

  9.  Take Action on your Plans: Don’t let that good idea die from procrastination! And if you need help, get coaching for success. It can literally take years off of your process.

Yes, Virginia despite the ire of Google Panda, it’s still possible to build your home-based business via article marketing.
However, follow these cheat sheet guidelines to insure Google your content is 100% original and valuable:

I. Avoid using spun versions of articles on your site. This will prevent duplicate content issues that the Google Panda algorithms monitor.
II. Focus on 2 keyword phrases per article, no more
III. Rotate anchor texts and urls in the resource box of articles. See sample below
A. John Smith is an Internet Marketing consultant and small business coach. Discover how you can make money online as quickly as today by visiting http://www.newschoolnetworkers.com where you can download the free step-by-step video training series now.
B. The html coding reads as follows, the anchor text is “make money online” which can be changed for other keywords for each article:
C. John Smith is an Internet Marketing consultant and small business coach. Discover how you can make money online as quickly as today by visiting http://newschoolnetworkers.com where you can download the free step-by-step video training series now.
IV. Manually submit 100% unique articles to sites like Ezine Articles
V. Don’t post articles or variations of articles to your blog, which are found anywhere else on the Internet
VI. For each post and content you create, use article marketing as a way to build incoming links to each new post or page on your site.
VII. If your site is new, be certain to monitor your article submissions to 10-20 SEO friendly directories during the first month. Rotate variations of the keyword phrase in the anchor text.
VIII. Don’t post articles to your site unless you are certain the content is 100% unique.
IX. Don’t post articles to your blog that are sent via article directory submissions.
X. Use the copyscape logo (http://copyscape.com) to signal your articles are 100% original

As you might imagine, Google loves blogs. Blogs are easy to create and provide an excellent vehicle for sharing your original content with your list. Your blog is the cornerstone of your home-based business. Safeguard your blog with great, original content that helps your subscribers solve their problems. Google will reward you with targeted traffic for your original contribution.

Is the “Thank You Economy” as Gary Vaynerchuk dubbed it, more than just “being nice and selling in an inoffensive way” when earning money from home?

You bet it is.

Anyone can fake their marketing by promising the moon, yet going dark when it’s time to man-up and deliver on their promises has become the modus operandi of more gurus than we want to admit in the IM industry.

As you might imagine, a lot of people have been burned in this new economy by buying push button promises that do nothing but empty their pockets.

Despite these challenges inherent in the Internet Revolution, the Information Age economy creates opportunities to show your subscribers and customers how much you care about how they experience your brand. This has never been possible until now. Therefore, the key to playing in this new sandbox is to be uniquely you and deliver more than you promise.

As a result of the cultural changes Facebook and Twitter have shaped, you can now be an eavesdropper on what people are saying about you. Gossip has always existed, but now you can use this gossip to build your home-based business.

Have you noticed how more than half the people walking around these days have their heads down, using their thumbs to punch-out what’s on their minds?

Beware.

This trend is not going away. In fact, according to Vaynerchuk, “As of May 2010, 72 percent of the adult population were texting, at a rate of about ten texts per day.”

Of course, everyone knows Social Media = BIG Business. But according to Vaynerchuk, the “Thank You Economy” is much, much bigger. Social Media just warmed up the culture that felt isolated and unappreciated.

Therefore, as a home-based entrepreneur, earning  money from home, it’s critical to understand that our culture and society have changed.

What will not change says Vaynerchuk is the “transparency and connection that social media revived.”

So, the message for those making money from home is to create a culture of caring and communication in your business, create great content, do what you say you will do, and do it better than anyone else. People will reward you with their loyalty and word of mouth.

If you wait for social media to prove itself, you risk stunting your business growth. And if you already feel tapped with having to do so many tasks each day, consider out-sourcing, and getting coaching-for-success to cut the learning curve. Can you afford NOT to?

If you are in the how to earn money from home niche, it is critical to differentiate yourself from the rest of the crowd, by creating great content.

In this new Information Age Economy content has become a highly valued intellectual property, which is fostered and nurtured through customer relationships.

As you might imagine, society is now rewarding content, which is high touch, honest, and instilled with integrity for solving people’s problems.

Because the ability to hone good relationships has always been part of intellectual capital, the advent of social media is transforming this skill into a wealth-building strategy.

So, for that reason, it’s more important than ever to understand the 5 secrets listed below for creating, sharing, and serving your audience with great content:

1. Strategy: People value strategies that instruct how to achieve an end goal. Therefore, outlining concise strategies for how to accomplish something is always the first element that tells the reader you have a valuable game plan for improving their life. So, when writing your content, include step-by-step guidelines for how the strategy works and how to apply it. People want to know WHAT will help them achieve their goals.
2. Synthesis: As you are aware people turn to the Internet for research about all aspects of their lives. Oftentimes, the research is so vast that it quickly creates info overload. By synthesizing this information for your audience, you can clear away the muddle that inevitably stops people from achieving their goals.
3. Structure: Now that you have done the homework for your audience, create an outline of the content and present it in an organized, step-by-step blueprint that can be easily followed. The human mind likes structure.
4. Simplicity: Further simplify the research/solutions and reduce them into 5-7 key points. This is usually the hardest part of creating content, because the ability to condense the material requires mastery of the subject. Making things easy requires inspiration. So this is a key element missing in most content. Make your solutions stand out.
5. Step-by-Step Instructions: Now that you have done the research, synthesized it, outline a structure with 5-7 easy steps, the next stage is to take your customer by the hand and walk them through what they have to do to solve their problem.

As you might imagine, each of these steps requires technical “How To” minutiae for how to accomplish a goal. And each strategy will have its own particular elements. However, the technical information is only part of the equation, because unless people learn how to overcome fear of failure and rejection, chances are they will be thwarted from reaching their highest potential, no matter how succinct your strategy is.

The reason is this, until one learns to control one’s thoughts, success is elusive.

For that reason, inspiring your audience HOW to expect success and giving them the steps for how to embrace their new leadership role, is the transformational key in actually creating the life of one’s dreams. Many are turning to coaching for success to get the edge.

The transformational elements for achieving success are seldom discussed as part of the blueprint for how to succeed. However, now with more and more people providing quality content about how to attain success, the philosophy about how to achieve and retain success is transcending its former boundaries. People are finally realizing that success is multi-dimensional and starts with the mind first.

As you might imagine, people are now beginning to realize that reaching one’s higher purpose and using it to interact with the world in a more meaningful, service context way is part of the underlined mission of the Information Age.

So, create that great content and share it so we give each other a hand-up instead of a hand-out, because it’s not just about how to make money from home anymore. Rather, it’s about how you can serve others to achieve the success they seek.

Okay, you’ve heard it before: outsource your obstacles and spend your time doing things that help you to make money from home.

Of course, hiring outsourcers is expensive. But few people reveal the fact there are numerous other obstacles outsourcing introduces into your life you might not have considered.

As you might imagine, posting an ad on oDesk, Elance, scriptlance, guru.com, renacoder.com, or freelancer.com, and the multitude of other online freelancers is only the beginning. Because finding the right person for the right job is dependent upon your ability to interview, and to establish an employer/employee relationship where you ask the right questions of your potential hire from the start.

Obviously, it’s critical to be able to clearly communicate your needs to the person you hire, so they will have a clear “wireframe” for what you want to achieve. Wireframes typically include step-by-step directions of what you want to accomplish. However, miscommunication is often a problem for new marketers because of their lack of the definite technical language needed to express the desired goal.

As you might imagine, hiring outsourcers, whose language skills are not primarily English, is in itself a minefield. Add to that a lack of technical language (css, php, javascript, html, photoshop, graphics, design, joombla, wordpress, seo, etc.) on the part of the employer, and you instantly set yourself up for a steep learning curve.

I just hired another design for a website I am creating for a new business, and it was the easiest one yet. But I realized that the job was easier this time, because I had already made tens of dozens of mistakes on the other projects. Hindsight is always 100%!

Mistake #1: This time I knew what I wanted to be included above the fold. Yes, that’s the area that appears when your website loads, without scrolling further down the page. This is the section that will cause your viewer to decide within seconds if they are interested in what you are offering. Putting the wrong stuff above the fold is suicide.

Mistake #2: As you might imagine, this header real estate above the fold is the most valuable on your website. So for that reason, it is primary that this section contain an optin form for gathering the name and email of your visitor. Not creating an optin form is catamount to shooting yourself in the foot.

Mistake #3: Of course, the font, white space placement, logo, graphics, and copywriting are also critical elements responsible for convincing your visitor to optin to your offer for a free video or report. If you don’t write good converting copy and place it in an aesthetically correct format for the IM industry, you won’t convert your visitors into subscribers.

However, finding an outsourcer who has marketing knowledge about font size and placement, and the knowledge about how to arrange the marketing elements for good conversions is typically not part of their job description. This is the frustration that can render a technically correct webpage, but one that lacks the ability to convert visitors into subscribers. Big mistake!

So, if you need a website with a sales funnel, squeeze page, upsells, download pages, and payment processors you can hire the work done, but do so with a word of caution. If you are unfamiliar with how these products work you are at the mercy of your outsourcer’s decision about what themes and systems they place on your website. The solution is to educate yourself about what works and doesn’t work firsthand.

Mistake #4: Just recently I discovered that many of the designers I hired to do sales and squeeze pages created the new pages outside my Flexsqueeze theme. Consequently, the work performed corrupted my Flexsqueeze theme to the point where my webpages took forever to load. This was a huge mistake that cost me time, money, and untold frustration trying to figure out how to correct it.

You can’t always assume your designer knows how to work within the themes another designer installed. Ask your outsourcer if they are familiar with your theme and include the name of your theme in the job description posting. Make it known that those unfamiliar with your theme need not apply for the job.

Mistake #5: This mistake makes my blood pressure boil just thinking about it, because it has happened  more times than I like to recount.

Imagine what it feels like when you’ve spent hours on Skype, working with your outsourcer, explaining your goals, giving endless examples of what you want done, rendering screen shots to reinforce your key points, and monitoring their screen shots posted on the site you hired them, only to have your outsourcer tell you that it can’t be done the way you want—and they know a better way.

Of course, these hires run up the hours it takes to complete the job. And they keep asking you to increase the weekly job hourly total. Argh. To make matters worse, you can’t get a clear answer from them about the problem, but they arrogantly reply that they know how to do the job.

After hiring dozens of outsourcers in the past few years, I can guarantee this is not an isolated problem. The truth is they have you at their mercy if you are not a techie sort. You need the job done and they know it.  What I have learned is that hiring someone from an agency limits this kind of problem, because you can leverage their employer. Hiring freelancers without agency affiliations is more risky.

And more importantly, no one ever tells you that when a relationship ends badly these renegade outsourcers have been known to do “dirty tricks” as GoDaddy calls it to your backoffice. That’s a nightmare you don’t want to face.

It is possible to learn all of these things on your own, but knowing what I know now, I wish I had gotten coaching for success to avoid the loss of time and money it took learning these things on my own.

However, the opportunity for ways to earn money from home continues to be one of the high-lights of this economy. Sharing our travails and insights can only make it easier for everyone in the long run.

Can you imagine where your ways-to-make-money-from-home business would be without your autoresponder sequence?

Certainly, without an autoresponder campaign, you wouldn’t be able to make money working from home. Because your autoresponder campaign is the cornerstone of your business, it’s not enough to draft a campaign and forget it, because your business is dependent upon your subscribers’ responses.

However, as you might imagine, the email deluge that floods subscribers’ boxes is now so overwhelming that many people are not clicking the links they once did to see your offers.

So, how do you fix this low response problem and re-energize your subscriber list to make them want to click your emails?

The following is a list of ideas designed to breathe life back into your autoresponder series:

I. Create High Quality Content: Remember people joined your list because they were promised good information to help build their businesses. So, share your knowledge and encouragement freely. Your job is to build a solid relationship with your subscriber by delivering more than you ask in return.

II. Offer Multiple Solutions with Multiple Products: Your list is a compilation of people who have many different problems. So, for that reason offer a selection of solutions. Remember people are genetically predisposed to accept a solution that meets their needs.

III. Do Your Research to Offer Links to Free Resources: It is your job to help people find free resources to help them build their business. Your purpose is to build trust in your relationship with your list. Guiding them to good, free options increases your click-thru-rates (CTR) for all your links.

IV. Be Authentic and Infuse Your Emails with Your Personality: People want to do business with people they like. Create rapport and share your beliefs and your personal story with your list. Let your audience know the trials and troubles you’ve encountered setting up your business.

V. Design Your Autoresponder Sequences as a Series of a Longer Story: Think of your favorite TV shows that keep you guessing week to week. These cliffhangers keep you coming back to find out what happened. Your autoresponder series can create this same dynamic by using “open loops” that reference a topic that will be covered in future emails. You might consider giving a hint for a particular problem you will be covering in a later sequence. This stirs peoples’ curiosity and makes them want to click on your link to find their anticipated solution.

VI. Thwart Info Overload: 95% of new marketers are deluged with info overload. Many become so overwhelmed they never recover. So, instead of throwing all the information at your audience at once, consider teaching it in segments, where you filter the information and give specific concrete steps to follow. Consider assigning homework designed to help your subscribers find success through incremental steps.

VII. Use Short Punchy Sentences and Narrow Margins in Your Email Messages: People have little time to read long emails. Keep your text short, under 60 or 65 characters per line, which is about ½ to 2/3 the width of the message space. Don’t type to the end of the line.

VIII. Ask For Feedback from Your Subscribers: Feedback is invaluable because it allows you to tweak your content to meet the needs of your audience. Answer all your email comments and use the negative comments to improve your message. Be certain to thank your subscribers for their input.

IX. Don’t Forget Bonuses: People are on your list because they like your message. So give them bonuses when they respond to your affiliate offers. Make certain it’s a bonus you have created.

X. Track Your Results: Unless you track your open rates, click-thru rates (CTR), purchases, and new subscribers you will be unable to make the necessary changes to up-your-autoresponder-click-appeal.

Instead of writing your emails in isolated instances, consider writing a collection of autoresponder messages in one sitting. This will keep the theme flowing and allow you to connect content by creating open loops to keep your subscriber coming back for more.

Remember, your autoresponder is likey one of  the only methods you have to communicate your enthusiasm and support to those who have given you their time and attention. So write great messages.

Remember to: Live to Love and Learn Like You Can’t Fail.