I haven’t written in this blog as often as I’d hoped… or as I should. There are many reasons for that, of course… too many websites and other irons in the fire, family chaos, poor work environment. But the bottom line is, I probably don’t have all the positive homepreneur habits I should have.

Luckily, I stumbled upon this article from Jimmy Brown, one of the internet marketing “gurus” I respect much. Jimmy puts out high quality, but super easy to implement, manuals and step-by-step guides on all aspects of home business. I think you’re going to enjoy this article…

How To Run A Successful Home Business

by Jimmy D. Brown

We were all sold initially on the idea of working from home. Sounded, great, didn’t it – work when you want, in your pjs  with the kids playing under your desk, or wearing your swimsuit while you’re staring at the ocean on your latest vacation. Yes, working from home gives you a huge amount of flexibility, but there are also quite a few pitfalls that you don’t really hear about until you’re knee deep in it already. Here are some of them. Let me know if any of this sounds familiar…

You’re constantly interrupted by your spouse, kids or friends who just want to ask you something quickly. (Really, it won’t take a minute!)  I can definitely relate to this one!!!

Your “office” also happens to be the living room, so you end up trying to focus while the television is going, and people are running all around the house.

You spend almost every waking hour either actively working on your websites or thinking about marketing strategies, product ideas and such when you should be spending quality time with your loved ones.

You waste hours each day surfing the net (and call it research), checking your stats or answering email.

The point is, we all develop these bad habits that don’t make us very productive. I bet that almost everything you’re doing in  your usual 10 hours plus workday right now, you could accomplish in under 3 hours provided you set yourself up to be really productive during that time.

And that’s exactly what you will learn in this new report called “Homepreneur Habits: How To Run A Successful Home Business”.

Find out how to set up your workspace, structure your day and most importantly, structure your business for maximum productivity and results. This report wasn’t created by just anyone, either. It was written by Jimmy D. Brown, one of the most successful Internet Marketers who fell into all the traps you’ve been falling into and then turned it around to a point where he is running and growing a huge home business spending just 3 hours a day working.

To your success,
Kathi

P.S. This isn’t just some dry theoretical report. Jimmy shares exactly what he does and how he has is office set up (with plenty of pictures) so you have plenty of “real life” examples. Grab the report here. You even get to see Jimmy in his PJ’s.

Have you been thinking about trying Site Build It?

If you have, Ken Evoy is offering his annual holiday special. Until midnight, January 4th, you can get 2 for the price of 1.

That is a super bargain.

But what will I do with 2 sites you ask?

You can buy one for now and build the second one later. Most people making a full-time living online have more than one site. You can start building one and wait up to nine months to start the second site.

Or you can…

Buy one for yourself and give the second one as a New Year’s gift to a friend. Do you know anyone who would like to quit their day job or needs extra money. Perhaps your husband, wife, son, daughter, mom, dad, friend, business associate, or anyone who is considering an online business that has the power to “change a life”.

And the best part is Ken guarantees your success. He’ll give you your money back if you decide you can’t do it (actually for any reason). What have you got to lose?

Get your new SBI website business started today!

When you start to get interested in starting an online home business, it is tremendously easy to lose focus. There are so many ways to go about it, so many models, a ton of “gurus” hawking this or that method “guaranteed” to bring you fame and fortune… it’s hard to know which way to turn.

And, in fact, this distraction and overwhelm is probably THE main reason why people fail at home business. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You CAN succeed. But focus… laser focus… is the key to success.

One of the best ways I know to stay focused is with a free program called Simpleology. It’s from one of the original internet marketing gurus, Mark Joyner. Mark’s a great visionary on the Internet, but he’s also just an all-around great guy who truly seems to have a mission to help people succeed.

What is Simpleology? Well, it’s kind of a goal-setting program, but that’s not really an adequate explanation. The best way to understand it is to sign up for a free account and just experience it:

Get your free Simpleology account here

But, in a nutshell, it’s a 15-minute daily program for focusing on what’s most important to you and then marching in a straight line towards those goals. There’s a manual to help you, but there are also animated videos that are quick to watch (most are under 3 or 4 minutes long), but that really bring the messages home. It’s also a learning program, I guess you’d say, that teaches you how to succeed.

As I said, it doesn’t cost anything to become a basic Simpleology member. You get full access from the get go to everything Simpleology 101 has to offer, and it’s a lot. Once you graduate from that course (which does take a while), you have the option of buying into the more advanced courses, but if you don’t want to do that, you don’t have to. You can continue to use the free Simpleology tools and system forever.

The system comes with downloadable software. I have to say, I haven’t really found that to be particularly useful and I don’t like it cluttering up my task bar. But you might feel differently. It’s optional and the system still works well even if you just stick with the web-based tools as I have.

So, if you’ve ever felt frustrated by your inability to get things done, whether in a home business or in any other area of your life, I really encourage you to check out Simpleology. It offers huge value for a free program, trust me. You’d be foolish to pass up such a valuable learning and focusing system.

Check out Simpleology NOW – For Free!

To your success,

Today, I’ll start to explore Jim’s odyssey to Internet marketing success. As mentioned in my last post, Jim has chosen the online home business model of a content site. It’s one of the easiest methods for a newbie to use and it’s my specialty.

The first step in starting a content site is to select the niche you want to build it around. Content sites must be tightly focused. Too broad a topic will prevent you from getting the search engines to see you as an authority site, an essential designation for success in search engine listings. You’ve heard the adage, “Jack of all trades, master of none?” That applies to a content site too. For a content site to succeed, you have to be seen as a master of a specific topic.

So, the first step in selecting your niche is keyword research. This can serve a couple of purposes:

• If you have no idea what niche you want to use, keyword research can help you hone in on your areas of interest to find one that is shared by lots of other people.
• If you already know what niche you want to use, it can help you prove that you’re not the only one who is interested in the topic.

You MUST prove your concept BEFORE you start building your site. There’s nothing worse than having a passion for a topic, spending weeks or months building your content, and then finding out hardly anyone else on the Web is looking for that information. It doesn’t matter how strongly you feel about the topic; you HAVE to be sure others share your passion, or all your hard work will be for naught.

When you start to look at keywords, you need to keep in mind  3 factors:

1. How much demand is there for the topic? You’re looking for monthly search numbers in the thousands, if possible.
2. How much competition is there, i.e., existing content sites already established?
3. What is the potential profitability (which you can roughly calculate by comparing competition/supply to demand)?

Jim was fortunate… he already had a niche in mind, and his keyword research revealed that it’s viable… tons of demand and very little supply at the moment. So he proved his concept and is now ready to move forward.

By the way, a good keyword research tool is essential. The gold standard is WordTracker and they do have a great free keyword tool: Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool

I find their metrics a bit complex to understand, though. If you’re looking for free, here’s another great free tool, called SearchIt: http://www.searchit.sitesell.com/

But what I use most for my keyword research is also from the same folks who produced SearchIt. It’s part of a robust platform for building super successful content sites, called Site Build It, or SBI for short. One of the key features of SBI is their Brainstormer tool. It quickly provides tons of keyword research data, with easy to understand numbers and flexibility with analysis of the numbers. Check out SBI here.

In the coming installments of this case study, I’ll be talking a lot about the many features of SBI. It’s how I built my main site that this blog appears on, as well as 4 other sites. And it’s extremely newbie friendly, which makes it perfect for Jim too.

That’s it for today. Next time, we’ll look at narrowing down the niche, and selecting a domain name.

To your success,

I thought a great way to educate people on how to succeed in internet marketing of an online home business would be to chronicle a case study, from start to (hopefully) successful finish. I am mentoring a friend of mine, a man named Jim, who is a complete newbie in home-based business on the Web. But he’s watched me grow & succeed over the past 7 years, and he wants in. He’s set himself a goal to make $100K a year by the end of the year so he can quite his J.O.B. (just over broke job) and enjoy total financial freedom.

I believe he can do it. He possesses immense creativity, a strong work ethic and the enthusiasm & motivation he needs to succeed.

The model he has chosen for an online home business is the one I’ve been most successful with… a content site. He has an emerging trend that is a huge passion for him and he’ll be starting a site about that niche topic.

Here are the general steps I’ll be taking him through:

• Researching & selecting a niche
• Planning the content topics & “voice”
• Building an organized and visually-pleasing website
• Optimizing for the search engines
• Driving traffic to the site via free traffic generation strategies
• Building a mailing list
• Adding community through interactivity & perhaps a membership component
• Monetizing the site through a variety of methods, including Google AdSense, affiliate marketing, and selling his own products
• Continuous improvement

As the months go on, you can come back here and read of Jim’s progress. In my next case study post, look for a rundown on the research and niche selection I’m putting Jim through. I guarantee you can learn from watching Jim grow!

To your success,
Kathi

This is the official launch of the HomeBiz BUZZ, a blog about starting an online home business. In the pages of this blog, I’ll be doing reviews, case studies and sharing tips and advice about every single aspect of starting your own computer-based business. From affiliate marketing to selling your own products, you’ll find the help here that you need to succeed in your own work at home business.

I hope you’ll stay with me as I share my knowledge over the coming days, weeks, and months!