Let’s Get Down To Business.

I can’t count the times that I have met a new person and at some point in speaking with them they have asked me what I do for a living. When I explain that I operate my own home businessselling stuff on the internet, the conversation usually turns into a question and answer session with me offering tips and suggestions on how to get started with a home based business on the internet.  So, since I’ve had so much practice in offering suggestions about starting an online home business, I’ll though I’d go ahead and put those suggestions in to words on this blog.

One of the first things that I always suggest to future entrepreneurs is to pick an area that they love or are interested in. This might sound like common sense. However, many people that want to start a home based business think that they need to sell what pays big bucks regardless of how interested they are in it.  I personally don’t recommend this approach.  In business, there are good days and there are bad days.  If you choose an area that you don’t enjoy,  then it is hard to stay motivated through the bad days and the likelihood of just quitting altogether is much higher.

The next thing that I highly recommend is to focus on a NICHE.  One of the definitions of niche is “A unique role of an organism in a community.” This pretty much fits the definition that I explain to people. You should find your unique role in the business community that you choose to be a part of.  Uniqueness is what helps a business to succeed.  It doesn’t have to be complicated. It just has to be different than the rest. And obviously different in a way that will make your business attractive to your customer base.  Finding your niche also makes it possible to market your product effectively. When I first started my online business, I tried to sell auto parts, computer accessories, sporting goods, and outdoor gear.  All from the same website.  Unless you are a complete marketing genius, this is not a good approach. I soon found that I could not effectively market so many different products. So I narrowed my product base to outdoor gear. Outdoor gear was still too broad. I left all of the outdoor gear products on my site, but I focused all of my marketing efforts on one specific area and it has had tremendous results. The area that I picked was “thermal underwear.” If you do a search on any major search engine for “thermal underwear”, you’ll find OuterSports.com on the first page. You’ll also find OuterSports on the first page for other phrases like “men’s thermal underwear.” Until I completely narrowed my focus and found my niche, I was never really able to make a noteable profit from my online business.

Now, before I wrap up this post, let me share a few tools with you that will help you research whatever ideas you have for your work at home internet business. When I say ideas, I’m really referring to keywords. Keywords are the words that people type into a search engine in order to find what they are looking for. If your site doesn’t have the right keywords relating to what you sell, then you won’t get the right customers visiting your site. Overture and Google provide free keyword research tools. These tools will give you an idea of how many times you keywords are searched for each month. This will help you determine how much demand there is for your product or service. They also list other keyword phrases that contain the keywords you entered. The Google tool goes a step further by giving you synonyms for your keywords so that you can find other relevant keywords that you hadn’t thought of. Once you have an idea of what you want to base your internet business on, you’ll want to use the paid keyword research tool Wordtracker. Wordtracker gives you the largest list of related keywords along with invaluable data and statistics on each keyword. Wordtracker has different plans to fit your budget. I use the one day plan for $7.96 so that I only have to pay to use it when I need to use it.

So, if you are thinking of starting an online homebased internet business, you’ll want to use these keyword research tools first so that you can get an idea of how much demand there is for you product or service.