How To Grow Your Home Business By Networking On Forums

by Internet Infopreneur on November 24, 2009
in Home Business

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Online discussion forums can cut both ways for home business owners like you. On one hand, you meet and get to know others with similar interests, some of whom may become your ideal business partners. On the other, you could waste too much of your working day on forums.

The trick then is to maximize your return from the time you invest on forums, contributing to the community, developing relationships and establishing connections.

Be Choosy About Forums

Every topic under the sun has a collection of online forums around it. Your goal is to limit your participation to the best ones. If there aren’t hundreds of members posting frequently, your time and effort to engage with the forum audience will not be worthwhile.

Set Strict Time Limits

You may decide to start out spending 15 to 30 minutes daily on discussion forums, reading posts and responding to a few. By restricting yourself strictly to that limit, you’ll avoid wasting too much time until you know it is going to be worth it.

Visit Forums After Work

It can be a bad habit to check out discussion forums at the beginning of your working day. You often get caught up in topics, or the tone of what some people say in posts can affect your state of mind to the point you’ll be less productive. So finish your daily important tasks, and then visit forums.

Engage Actively On Forums

Get involved in forum activities if you want to get the most benefit. Join discussions, participate with enthusiasm and be polite to fellow members. Remember that more people will silently be watching how you network than will be active in discussions – but among them will be many who may partner with you.
Give as much value as you can contribute. Always keep in mind that you are representing your home business, and try to project the kind of image you want others to carry about you and your business.
Learn the rules about self-promotion, so that you’ll take advantage of all opportunities (like using signatures and links to your website) without violating the rules or crossing any limits.
Most important, measure and track the impact of your forum participation on your business. Is your list growing? Are you making more sales? Or learning new stuff? Making great connections? If you are not, move on. Try another forum. Or even give up on this avenue and focus on others that work better.

Forum networking can be extremely helpful in growing your home business, or turn into a time sump that sucks away most of your working day. What you let it do for your business is a personal choice – and depends upon how you intelligently use forum marketing.

Make sure you don’t miss the other articles in this series called “If I Had To Start Again” and shares valuable lessons from my 15 years of building a home business on the Internet. Register for the notification email list – click here.

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"Think, Write & RETIRE!", a popular coaching program by Dr.Mani, has helped hundreds of Internet infopreneurs turn words into massive wealth - easily. It is available as a print book from www.ThinkWriteRetire.com

Dr.Mani is a pediatric heart surgeon, and an experienced infopreneur who creates and sells infoproducts to help fund life-saving treatment for children from under-privileged families who have congenital heart defects. To learn more about Dr.Mani's business and non-profit work, you can visit his website at www.DrMani.com

Tags: forums, Home Business

Craft Your Incredibly Effective Blog Commenting Strategy

by Internet Infopreneur on November 20, 2009
in Home Business

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If your home business aims to attract a flood of targeted traffic and build up a position on search engines, then you need many back links. And one very effective way to get links from related sites is to post comments on other blogs.

By carefully choosing the kind of blogs you comment on, you can ensure the quality and relevance of all back links you build to your home business website.

Doing Your Research

Your first task is to find blogs related to your business. You can do this by searching for blogs by keyword phrase, or using blog directories like Technorati to locate the best ones.

One way to leverage all this effort is to combine this research with your other tasks like finding news items and content to use in your email newsletter, and identifying potential partners to help sell your products. Using software tools may help speed up and simplify this process too.

Your Commenting Schedule

Make blog commenting a part of your regular marketing activity. Do it on a schedule, and not as and when you feel like it. Have a daily routine in which one component is to visit blogs in your niche, read interesting posts, and leave relevant comments that both give you back links to your website and establish your authority as an expert to other readers of those blogs.

Using Blog Comment Software

This is important because of potential pitfalls and dangers. While using software to locate related blogs is a time-saver, most automated blog commenting software are viewed as spamming tools – with good reason. And as a blog owner, you’ll realize how annoying it is to be hit by a deluge of sham comments posted by these robots.

Before you choose to use blog commenting software to post automatically, be sure you have carefully researched them and realize the danger of being flagged as an abusive website, with a seriously negative impact on your business.

Outsourcing Your Blog Comments

If you are seriously short of time, and wish to engage someone else to post comments on blogs on your behalf, make sure to take the time to explain your strategy to that person. Clearly define the nature of comments you want to have posted, and be aware that the comments will reflect upon your business when they are viewed by other blog readers.

Posting comments on blogs is a very effective way to bring in new visitors to your home business, and present yourself in favorable light to audiences you cannot reach otherwise. But a reasonable degree of caution and planning is required to derive all the benefits you want for your business.

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Tags: blog comment, Home Business

Does Your Home Business Have a Back-Links Strategy?

by Internet Infopreneur on November 17, 2009
in Home Business

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One of the major factors that determine your website’s ranking on search engine is the number and quality of back-links from other related sites. All other things being equal, a site with more back-links will rank higher than another which has fewer.

There are many nuances to getting back-links, such as varying the anchor text of your links, and building them up over time in a natural way (as opposed to suddenly generating a bunch of them all at once).

Planning out a back-links for your home business website will pay you back richly.

Back Links From Article Directories

As you build up your home business website’s content, make sure to repurpose some of the content as articles which you will submit at various article directories to get back-links from them.

Back Links From Blog Comments

Following a systematic blog comment approach can get you many back-links from relevant and related blogs that grow in number steadily over time. Just make sure your comments are valuable and in line with the blog owner’s policies.

Back Links From High PR Sites

There are many sites and resources which have high page rank, and on which you can place links back to your home business website. Finding these high PR sites and placing links on them can add authority to your site in the eyes of search engines.

Back Links From Press Releases

Many press release services will host your message with an active link back to your business site. Some of them charge a fee to do this, but the value you will get in the form of a visible back-link make it a worthwhile investment.

Back Links From Social Bookmarking

By pinging your website on many social bookmarking sites, you’ll get back-links from them. While these links often do not carry much SEO advantage, they are visible to thousands of prospects who will visit your site through them.

Who Will Work On Your Back Links?

There are many other ways to get back links to your site. And this work is time and effort intensive, sometimes involving phone calls to webmasters and the creation of unique content that is also appealing to consumers.

If you cannot handle this all yourself, be prepared to outsource it to service providers, or hire a helper to negotiate back links on other sites.

Like many other effective marketing methods, the building up of back links to your home business website is a slow, but sure process. Be prepared to invest the time and energy (even money) to do it right. Some years later, you will be glad you did!

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