Use the top social media networks for your home office business

How are you using social media for your home business?   Social media applications like facebook and twitter are a great place to interact with your friends and family members.  It can also be a place to discuss your business.

Do you have a facebook business page?  You might not want to use your personal facebook for status updates about your home business.  Social media applications like facebook have a lot of users and it seems like the number of people using them continues to grow.  If your potential customers and clients are there, it is probably a good idea for your business to be there too.

Social media apps can combine with mobile marketing opportunities. People are connecting to the web using smartphones and tablets while they are on the go.  They can take pictures and find what is going on locally just by hitting a few buttons.  Get your home business ready with social media apps. 

Get a vanity facebook url for your business page.  When you first create a business page, the url will look kind of funky.  Get a custom url that is easy to remember and related to your home business. 

Facebook is not the only game in town when it comes to social media.  Twitter and LinkedIn are two other social media apps that you should consider. 

Twitter is simple to use.  You have status updates that are capped at 140 characters. You might have to get a creative to get your point across. 

LinkedIn is a professional social network.  This is a great way to connect with people from your academic past and your past colleagues from old jobs.  This network is more grown up and business focused.  With LinkedIn, people might be looking for answers to questions.  They might be searching for jobs.  Show your expertise online with LinkedIn and it might lead to new business opportunities.

Social media apps are a good way to get information about your home business on the web.  The real benefit of social media is that it doesn't have to cost you money.  It will cost you some time to manage your social media accounts, but there is not an out of pocket cost that you need to be concerned with. 

Social networks are a huge collection of web users.  You will be surprised at the people that you know, and the people they know.  Use social networks for your home business today.

ClientGettingChallenge.com - Get Training on How to Get Clients

There is a free webinar that is happening right now that you should take advantage of.  It is called the client getting challenge.  It is being put on by Maria Gudelis. 

Do you have a consulting business?  Do you want to become a paid offline marketing consultant?  This webinar gives some tools and tips that can help you get started. 

The challenge is only 5 days long and the webinars go for just about an hour or more.  These are practical tips that you can put into place today to start getting the ball rolling with your business. 

Are you having a hard time getting clients?  This could be just the training that you are looking for.  Consulting is big business and if you are looking to break into consulting, you don't want to miss this.

What kinds of consulting are they covering?  Social media and marketing mostly, but you can apply the principles to just about any type of consulting business.  The main key is to start taking action.

Don't worry if you have missed the first day or two of the challenge.  They have provided access to the webinars via replay at the website.  The website is http://www.clientgettingchallenge.com

Make Youtube Videos for Your Home Office Business

Get your home office business in front of a large web audience.  People love to read blogs but they might be even more inclined to sit and watch a short video.  Have you thought about doing video marketing for your home office business?

There are so many ways to create fast videos for your home business.  If you are ready to get in front of the camera, you could star in videos and post them quickly to youtube.  Tutorials can be really popular online.  So explaining how things work and helping people get through tough problems that they might face with software or hardware could be your online ticket for making videos.

Making videos for youtube doesn't have to be hard.  Turn your spreadsheets into youtube videos.  Create regular powerpoint presentations and use screen capture software to add audio while you flip through the slides.  This is an effective way for creating videos.  There are different screen recording software programs that you can choose from.  Camtasia and Cam Studio are two of the popular programs for making videos.

Get more out of your smartphone.  Your smartphone probably comes with a video feature.  Test it out and see how the video looks.  You could use your smartphone to make videos that you post on youtube and other online video sharing sites.

Creating videos for youtube is not hard at all. After you make your videos, you will need to provide all the details that make a difference for people trying to find it online.  First stop by the google free keyword tool that is located on the google adwords site ( adwords.google.com).  Find those high search keywords related to your video and come up with a really good keyword focused title for your video.  Another area that you have to pay close attention to is the description area.  Give details about your video.  This is the area where you can place good written copy to explain all that you need to about the video and more. Also include a link back to your website or blog in the description area. 

Tag your video with the right keywords.  The great thing about using youtube for your videos is that they are tied to google.  People do searches on the google website and sometimes videos from youtube pop up in the search results.  Also youtube itself is a widely used search engine. 

So there you have it.  You probably already have a ton of written content for your home office blog.  Think about turning that written content into video content and get access to more potential visitors and customers. 

Recurring Income for Your Home Office Business

The idea of working once and getting paid for it over and over again is appealing.  How can you do something like this from your home office?  One way to get paid over and over again is through using your writing.  You can do the work of writing once and get paid every time someone buys your book or information product.

Writing tends to last a long time.  Once you get your information product created, the focus has to turn to marketing the product.  There are lots of information products to chose from, but yours might be just what your market is looking for.  You cannot discount the way technology is changing the way that people get information.  Smartphones and tablet computers are giving people a simple way to get information while they are mobile.  Creating your own ebooks is a great way to tap into this emerging market.

The idea of recurring income can be exciting.  What about other ways to get paid over and over again.  Magazines have subscriptions but you still have to keep coming up with new content.  In the digital world, you could create your own membership website.  Membership websites operate just like magazines.  You would need to create content around your topic and get people to pay monthly for access to your information.  If you don't want to create all the content for yourself, you could always outsource some of the writing or use private label rights content. 

Regular websites or blogs could be a passive income stream for your home office too.  You could do keyword research and setup niche sites.  Setting up simple sites with wordpress is easy.  Make money with the sites through contextual and banner ads with services like google adsense, kontera, or chitika.  Joining related affiliate programs with products that fit the niche is also a good idea.  There are yearly costs that you will have to incur.  Domain name registration fees and web hosting fees are two that you might have to pay if you are not using free blogging systems to host your sites.

Another idea to consider is building up your own email list.  Email is not going away anytime soon.  Sure people have smartphones and they like to do text messages, but chances are that you have an email account and you check it everyday.  When you have an email list, you can load it up with information and let it send out information automatically.  In addition to the information that you provide, it is also a great place to include affiliate promotions and advertisements for products and services.  Again, you can think of the magazine model.  When you open up a magazine, there is much more inside than just the articles.  An email newsletter with an auto-responder can be another digital version of a magazine.  They call this type of online magazine an ezine.  Ezines are not totally hands off.  You have to create content on a consistent basis and it could require the use of outside writers or private label products.

The idea of working one time and getting income over and over in the future is not new.  You have to keep your eyes open and try new things. 

Web Traffic - Should you create your own affiliate program?

The other day I was able to view a webinar that talked about generating a lot of web traffic.  This is a topic that never goes out of style.  People want more web traffic and they want to make money off that traffic.  A home office website or blog is no different. 

The main point of the webinar was about changing your position.  Are you a one person business?  If you are then, it all falls on your shoulders to get things done.  You can only write so many blog posts and create so many articles for the article directories.  This webinar talked about turning the tables and getting others to help you get traffic.

It talked about how to generate web traffic and it was interesting. The other point that was raised was that getting traffic in itself is not the issue.  They gave an example of a website owner that was getting tons of web traffic but they were not making any sales.  That would really piss just about anybody off.  You go through all the trouble of getting traffic and then you don't have anything to show for it.  Isn't that just as bad as not getting any traffic at all? 

There was not much new that was learned during the webinar.  Taking action was the big factor.  The other big secret was about the role that you are playing.  It was all about leverage.  The solution was to start an affiliate program and get other affiliates to promote your own products and get traffic that way.  It makes sense.  Instead of trying to get traffic yourself, you let others generate traffic and sales for you and you pay them a commission. 

Have you thought about using leverage to get web traffic? 

Getting Traffic for Your Home Office Web Blog

Are you joining the ranks of other home office workers that have decided to start a blog?  Blogs are easy to start but how do you get traffic for it?  There are a number of different things that you can do to help get web traffic for your blog.

Blogging is all about sharing information and you need to keep updating your site with new content.  You want to do this for two reasons.  Your site followers are going to want to read new content and new information can help you with the search engines.

You can post information on your blog first and then think about adding content on other sites online.  Article directories are a good place to add content.  Provide links back to your blog in your profile area.  The benefit of using an article directory is that you article could be picked up and distributed to a large online audience that you might not otherwise get access to. 

Don't forget about going old school.  What about using free classified ads?  Craigslist and other free online classifieds sites get a lot of internet traffic.  There is nothing wrong with creating ads related to your online services. Provide a link to your blog so people can learn more information. 

Use the internet for all that it is worth.  You are not the only person with a blog.  You could check out a few other blogs in your niche or even another area that you are interested in.  Read articles and supply comments on what you find interesting.  Most blogs will have an area in the comments section to include a web address.  Provide your email and blog url along with your comments.  Don't spam, but really provide helpful comments that keep the conversation flowing.  The web is all about interaction and blog commenting is right along those lines.

Take your blogging in new areas.  You don't have to just sit and write content online to get web traffic.  Think about using other media forms to land some visitors and web traffic.  Make videos and do audio podcasts and remember to mention your blog address.  Reading long blog posts might not be the favorite cup of tea for every internet user.  So give them multiple ways of finding out about your blog site. 

Setting up a blog can be super simple.  The work comes with trying to get web traffic to your site.  Try multiple methods of landing new blog viewers.  Try one or try them all.

Home Office Technology - Get a webcam

Another item to add to your home office technology tool kit is a webcam.  If you have a newer laptop computer it might come standard with it, but if you have an older computer for your home business, you could get a webcam for next to nothing.

Why would you want a webcam for your home office?  Video is huge online. You probably already have a website or a blog for your home business, but it would be nice to more than just written text for your online audience.

A webcam is simple to install.  They usually come with a usb connector.  All you have to do is plug it into your computer and you are on the road to making your own videos for your home business.

The next step is choosing a software for producing your videos.  Just check online at some of the top software sites.  You will be able to find some good software at download.com

Another benefit of getting a web camera is for video calling.  If you have a skype plan, you can talk and see the people on the other end of the call if they have a webcam too.

Web cameras can be vary as far as quality.  When you are just starting out, you might just want a simple webcam that gets the job done.  You can always upgrade to a better camera later on down the line.  A simple webcam that gets your feet wet can give you a glimpse of the possibilities.

I picked up a webcam from amazon for under 5 dollars.  It was a generic webcam, but it is easy to use and it even had lights on it. Think about adding a simple technology tool that can come in handy in your home office and home business.