How To Succeed With Your Home Business Online

Here are some practical steps you can take to succeed online, or be more successful if you’re already doing well.  These are some useful home business tips from Michael Rasmussen,  one of the most respected Internet marketers:

“To start a Home Business Online you always have to focus on doing the things that will boost your chances of success.

Fortunately, those things aren’t mysterious at all. They’re absolutely practical. And they can work for you, just like they did for me.

Here’s what you need to do…

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FOCUS ON WHAT MAKES CASH
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Just about everyone in business school at Harvard or anywhere else learns a basic management principle:

“Cash is king.”

If you don’t have consistent positive cash flow, you’re sunk.  If you do have consistent positive cash flow, pretty everything else can work itself out. You’ll have FAR less pressure.

The best way I know of to keep cash coming in is to focus on two things:

• Offering things with high perceived AND actual value
• Getting highly targeted visitors to youroffer(s)

It’s never more complicated than that, and I can say from personal experience that it works like crazy.

For example, years ago now I created a product called Email Promos Exposed. It’s a no-cost course full of great content to teach people how to do email marketing.

When people sign up for the course, I offer an advanced version that isn’t free. Because the intro course is so good, a LOT of people buy the one that costs.

The perceived value of what I’m giving away is high, and the actual value is high too. That dramatically increases my sales on the back end.

Once I created that offer, all I had to focus on was getting people to see it.

No sales happen without visitors, so I had to build a system to get lots of people to see my offer. I did that primarily through JVs, since my front end offer was a great deal that partners liked promoting.

You should look for opportunities to do what I did.

You don’t necessarily have to offer something for no cost, although it’s a great strategy. But the key is to focus on great offers and getting people to see them. Success follows from that.

Cool software tools, and websites, and marketing tactics, and graphics…it’s all wonderful.

But even an ugly website can make you wealthy if you present good offers to a huge numbers of people.

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KEEP LEARNING
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I can’t overstate the value of this enough.

About five years ago, my own business hit a serious slump. It was awful. It seemed like nothing I was doing worked anymore.

I wracked my brain trying to figure out what was wrong, but then it dawned on me…I was doing THE SAME OLD THING.

There’s nothing wrong with sticking with a strategy that is working. That’s smart business.

But when something stops working, it’s time to make a change.

After thinking about it some more, I realized that I had been so heads-down working on my business that I hadn’t kept up with what was going on in my market.

Once I started looking around and learning again, everything got back on track within a couple months.

The only way to succeed in the long term is to be innovative. The only way to do that is to keep learning new things.  That’s a basic building block of success.

And here’s an easy way to keep yourself headed in that direction…

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DO SOMETHING NEW EVERY 6-12 MONTHS
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I don’t care if your existing business is humming along just fine.

It doesn’t matter if your income is great and you’re feeling good.

If you get complacent, you’ll end up falling behind and eventually hit a speed
bump.

So force yourself to do something new at least once every 6-12 months.

I’m talking about things like:

• Start up a creative new income stream in your existing market
•  Enter a new market that complements one you’re already in
•  Enter a completely new market with an entry-level product
•  Create a new information product
•  Outsource something you’ve always done yourself
•  Reach out to a new potential JV partner with a creative proposal for how to work together

You can see where this is going.

You need to get out of your comfort zone a little bit and force yourself to learn and innovate.

I’m not saying you have to be a genius, and I’m not saying you have to turn your back on a strong business that’s working well for you.

I’m just saying you need to keep yourself from getting stuck in a rut. This has always paid off big for me. Simple example…

Just a few years ago now, I started to see the “email marketing” world get very crowded. So I spent some time figuring out a new way to do it.

At the time, very few people were doing what I call video promotions. That’s where you send an email to people and give them a link to your own video where you describe a product you’re promoting.

I hadn’t ever done one before, but I had seen a couple and I thought I could do something at least as good.

Within a week I had a brief script worked up to promote a new product a friend of mine had just released.

I worked with him to create a great bonus for it, and I created some PowerPoint slides to present the product and the bonus.

My conversions for that promotion shot through the roof. It was easily 50% better than my last email-only promotion.

Now I do both kinds of promotions, and the mix works well. I never would have found that out if I hadn’t done something new.

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GET SUPPORT
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It’s just a fact that a home business online can be VERY lonely.

Think about it. If you’re doing this the way most people do, you’re starting your home business as a side thing while you still have a full-time job.

That can be insanely hard. You can spend lots of hours working on your home business after putting in a full day at your job.  It can be exhausting.

And I bet you know that you will hit snags and failures along the way.

That’s why you need support.

Find some marketing friends who can pick you up when you’re feeling down.

If your family is supportive, definitely lean on them whenever you can.

Trying to get your home business going all on your own can be scary and wearying. Don’t be a lone wolf and shoot yourself in the foot.

And even if you see some success and replace your day job, you’ll end up spending most of your time as an Internet marketer alone.

Sure, you’ll have your family and the rest of your life outside of your home business, but the business side of it can be just you at your computer in your living room.

That’s why I always suggest getting involved in online forums or local business groups. You might also consider attending live marketing events.

Support and encouragement can be the difference between success and failure.  Don’t cut yourself off!

When I was building my home business, I had almost no support at all aside from my wife (she was great, but she’s just one person).

That meant I struggled for years. Once I started stepping out and making some online friends, my career literally took off.

Looking back, it was so simple. I was spinning my wheels because I was locked in a room trying to go it alone. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

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THE SUCCESS SHORT CUT
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If you focus on what makes cash, keep learning, do something new 1-2 times a year and get the support you need, you can take a HUGE shortcut to success.

I’m not saying that’s some kind of magic formula. Those don’t exist.

But I AM saying that you can speed up your success if you do the five simple things I just told you about.

I hope this helps.