If you’re reading this blog post you’re probably knee deep in planning for a new website for your small business. You’ve heard that “content is king” on the Internet. And you may be wondering – What content? Where do I get it? What will help my business?

Your Website Content Needs to Help Your Customer

Keep your customer or site visitor in mind when you plan your content.  Whether your site visitors are looking for the solution to a problem, or just surfing for information, your site needs to be all about them. With the exception of the About page, you should not focus on you or your company.

To focus on your site visitors, you need to know what they want. So how do you find out?

1. Visit forums and social media sites where your target customers hang out.
2. Ask them – Use a survey to determine their interests or ask them to suggest topics they would like to know more about.
3. Visit the sites of competitors.
4. Track your links in emails and or website, to see what content gets clicked.
5. Don’t just track what people buy. If you have articles and other content on your site, pay attention to what articles they read and the videos watched to get a sense of interests outside your present offerings.
6.  Of course, you want to give them a taste of your product or service, but whatever you share should be what they NEED or WANT. That’s why a lot of people place articles, videos and other content on their websites.

The type of content you include will depend on your business:

If you are a coach, trainer or consultant, you want them to experience your style and what it would be like to work with you. But you need to do that carefully by sharing a sample of what you would provide them as clients. You want them to get a sense of the value you would bring to their business or their life if your customer is a consumer. You can do that with your website’s content or the freebie you give away to encourage them to join your list.

Writers, photographers and graphic designers typically showcase their work, to let the prospect determine if their work is a good fit.

If you plan to develop an ecommerce site, you’re going to want ad copy that will sell your product or service. You’ll also want the prospect to see, hear and experience your product with a photo or video and maybe even a demo.  You’ll want them to hear a sample of your talks or speeches if you are a speaker.

Whatever you do, don’t talk about your company.

This sampling of what you have to offer and how it will benefit the buyer is much more important than all the details about your company. You do want to establish a relationship with your site visitor by giving them a sense of your company’s personality – but trust me, they won’t care until they have decided that they’re interested in what you’re selling.

Website content can take many forms.

 Be creative. You should offer a variety of formats to suit different learning styles and preferences. Some people prefer to read information while others are more visual. Some people need to hear your material or touch it before they can really make a decision. The more varied your website content, the better.

Let your imagination go. Consider anything that enhances the quality of your prospect’s site visit. In our next post, we’ll talk about how to create great content and where to look for ideas.

I haven’t been able to blog for a few days, what with packing and spending a day in airports and at 40,000 feet in the air, as I traveled to spend the holidays with my daughter in San Francisco.

If you have only experienced the City by the Bay as a tourist, you may never have seen one of its farmers markets – which as small businesses go, is about as small and as close to your customer as you can get.

So I wanted to share a few photos I took at Alemany Boulevard which serves some of San Francisco’s residential neighborhoods.

It’s the day after a rainy night with turbulent winds. Only a fraction of the normal crowd ventures out after it rains. So it was pleasant walking around the various booths, viewing fruit that for me is a bit exotic such as these pointy, odd-shaped lemons.

I dressed for the cold with too many clothes. It’s drizzling, but not as cold as I expected.

San Francisco is a delightful mix of cultures and colors, unlike what you’ll find in the East. Here my daughter poses with her bag of goodies.

It’s the one place where palm trees and tropical flowers blend with 50 to 60 degree temperatures and that famous San Francisco fog. It was so thick the day before I couldn’t see the bay that is easily visible from my daughter’s kitchen and living room windows. But by Saturday, the fog has lifted leaving only the light drizzle.

If you ask me, this is just one of the great spots that make San Francisco so much fun. Every year, I have a new experience ranging from great restaurants and museums, to Sausalito Shops near the Golden Gate Bridge—one of my faves.

Ironically, in one of the world’s techiest cities, good food, a regular location and a colorful sign get the job done. Marketing doesn’t get any easier than this!

SERPS - Search Engine Result Pages

By now your head may be spinning, but hang on. You can master this stuff if you don’t try to rush the process. By learning proper SEM techniques, you can succeed in gaining more website traffic. 

The first key to SEM is to learn how to correctly reach your intended audience. When searching for products and services on the web, consumers input specific search terms into search engines to find what they are looking for. 

To ensure that they find your site, you will want to use keyword phrases on your web pages that match the search terms your target audience is using. 

SEM and Keyword Research 

You need to use keyword lists and keyword tracker tools to determine the best keyword phrases to use on your website.  Keep in mind that SEM involves balancing the needs of people who will visit your website with the demands of the search engines themselves. 

This is done through SEO or Search engine optimization. Search Engines use specific criteria to determine how relevant a web page is to a specific search term. To do this, search engines use software called spiders to search the pages of a website to categorize its information. SEO is so important to the success of your website that you should consider it while you are building your website. It takes a lot less time and effort than having to change your site later. 

Submitting your Site to Search engines 

Now it’s time to submit your optimized site to search engines. The whole idea behind SEM is to have a good presence on search engines, so they connect you with your target audience. 

There are three different ways for search engines to find your website. 

1. You can directly submit the website to the search engine by filling out a submit form.
2. You can choose to simply let the search engine gain access to your website by having links to your site on other website directories.
3. You can pay for the search engine to categorize and index the site.

You can also draw traffic to your site by getting other similar websites to link to your site. The links can be from articles, other websites and blogs, or from online directories. This is another factor search engines consider when ranking your site: the quality and quantity of links that bring visitors back to your site. 

Your website needs to contain great content to entice other websites to link to your site. If the value of what you offer visitors is solid, owners of other websites will want to stay linked to your site. 

 Think of their link as a type of validation – word of mouth advertising — to their traffic that what you offer is useful to their site visitors. Keep these thoughts in mind as you plan the SEM for your website and you should drive quality traffic.

By now, I hope you have some idea of the direction your home business will take. Whether you plan to blog, freelance, promote other people’s products or create your own, you will need a PLAN.

If you are not sure where to start you might benefit from some of the step-by-step guides sold online. But you might enjoy creating your own process guides, charts and checklists.

Develop a short business plan

You should start by developing a short business plan that describes your basic ideas, the niche or target market you plan to pursue and the business model you will use. You also will want to outline your various projects and campaigns, along with your keyword lists, information about your niche and anything else that will help you achieve your goals.

You can outline your plans using such traditional tools as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. But there are other tools that might prove even more useful.

Plan your sales funnel and list-building strategies

As you plan, you are going to want to diagram your company’s sales funnel along with whatever steps you plan to take to acquire new customers. You could buy pricey software for this purpose, or you could use a simple graphics program to illustrate the processes you will use.

Here is a diagram I created in Microsoft Publisher for a friend who wanted to add internet marketing features to his network marketing business.

Map out your projects

Project managers often use Gantt charts to plan projects that involve a lot of different tasks, people and resources. You can do the same thing with mind mapping software that lets you fit your entire project on one page. Here is a mind maps I created for a special report using Mindjet Mindmanager, a neat package that is a little pricey. However there are several free mind mapping programs available online as downloads. If you draw a little, you might enjoy mapping your projects by hand using color pens and large sheets of paper.

Improve your videos with simple storyboards

Many internet marketers are producing videos to promote products or as short lessons. Unfortunately, many of these videos look as though the marketer just grabbed a camera and started shooting. You can create a short storyboard for your video projects using a graphics program or maybe even Microsoft Word using tables. Here is an example of a short storyboard created for a short video showing how to weatherize homes.

As you can see, planning can be fun with a little imagination, so give yourself an edge by capturing your ideas in a visual form to help you stay on track.

So you got a blog, you put up articles and still, your affiliate marketing programs haven’t made one thin dime. There are other ways to monetize your blog and have it generating the most money possible. Once you learn this set up for your own blog, you’ll probably start dreaming up more niche markets to conquer using this method.

First of all, make your blog stand out. If you are just hosting your blog at Blogspot or the WordPress websites, bite the bullet and get yourself some hosting. There are numerous places around the web to get cheap hosting and the smartest move you can make is to get yourself a reseller account. That means you can create nearly unlimited domains and only pay for the domain name, usually less than $10; and pay nothing more for your domain. This means you can create extremely targeted blogs with a very minimum of investment.

Next, Adsense is still a good thing to ad. There are a lot of other Pay-Per-Click advertisers out there, but their traffic all pales in comparison to Adsense. Text ads that match the rest of your website will fit seamlessly and generate more clicks. Also, choose your affiliate marketing programs with care. Do a little research and choose products that are targeted to the content you’re putting up. If you have a blog about Boxer dogs, use affiliate marketing programs such as a dog training ebook, boxer imprinted items from another affiliate program you joined and maybe sign up to market organic dog food or gourmet dog treats. All of these will make great relevant content for your site and help boost your blog as an authority on Boxer dogs.

Content? Yes, content. You need original content and the reason is simple. If the set up and content of your blog matches other blogs out there exactly, Google and other search engines will consider your site irrelevant and it will placed in supplemental results – in short, no one will find you. Be unique, write your own content or buy content, no matter how you get it up there. it will help boost your blog’s page rank and organic search results. One good way to get content ideas is to put in your keyword or keyword phrase and then hit the “News” search on Google and find a relevant current event that relates to your content to talk about on your blog – this keeps your content fresh and up to the moment. If there’s talk about a bill in congress to make spaying and neutering dogs mandatory except for breeders, relate that to your own content and write about it – once you get in the habit of it, you’ll find the ideas flow easily.

If you aren’t sure how popular your blog is at the moment, make your blog popular. Go to one of the many Social Networking venues such as Digg.com, Sphinn.com or Technorati.com and put up your own posts. Also, hit forums that are in your genre and in your signature line, put a link to your site. If you want to promote your Boxer dog blog, show up at some boxer-related forums and post and answer questions. It may take a few postings on the boards but people will get interested and visit your site, click on an ad or two and hopefully buy one of your affiliate marketing programs earning you a commission.

Those are just a few ways to help your blog make some money. Once you get this going with one blog, you can expand outwards and have two, then three and more blogs all earning a steady income. Just do your research and choose your programs with the thought in mind they need to work together with the theme and content of your blog and  you can create a great source of passive income for years to come.

Admit it, you feel like you’re trapped between a rock and a hard place. It seemed like a great idea for you to stay home with the kids while your husband worked and you both did your homework, watched your budget and figured out how to make it work so you could quit your job and save that money you were spending on gas and child care.

Now, this many months into the arrangement and you’re finding you just don’t have enough to make ends meet due to the brake job the family car needed, that leak in the kitchen you had to get fixed and your tax refund was far less than you both anticipated this year; but you don’t want to go back to work and put your kids back in daycare -what’s a good solution? Selling on Ebay and if you do it right, you can have an enviable income source.

You’ve heard it often enough,”You can make money on Ebay!” and you know what? It’s true. Ebay is a website where millions of people log in every day looking to buy and it’s no wonder there are people making thousands of dollars per month selling items.

There are three ways you can go with Ebay:

1.  You can sell items from your home
2.  You can create items to sell
3.  You can set up an affiliation with a dropshipper

The easiest way to get started on Ebay is sell unwanted items around your home. Clothes the kids have outgrown, shoes sell well, there’s a market for jewelry, home furnishings, clothes and pretty much anything you can think up can be sold for a profit on Ebay.

If you’re artsy or crafty you can sell your creations on Ebay. Before you go out and make a bunch of items to sell (at additional expense) do your best to sell what you have on hand. Sell items around your home to raise money to buy craft supplies. The idea is to spend as little as possible of any “house” money – you’re supposed to be making a profit!

Dropshipping is the final way to do business on Ebay and if you work it right, you can walk away with enough profits that your husband may consider quitting his day job and doing it with you. Dropshipping in a nutshell is when someone else allows you to sell their items and they ship it to your customer under your name. There is no stock to buy and nothing to invest. The customer bids and wins your auction. You pay the dropshipper and supply the winning bidder’s mailing information and the item is shipped as if from you. Easy? You bet.

There are literally dropshippers for every product you can imagine from baby items to Rolex watches. When you’re setting up a dropshipping arrangement, find out if the dropshipper charges any fees for their services. If they do, incorporate those fees into your shipping charges. Also, calculate how much your Ebay auctions will cost to put up and the percentage Ebay will take off the sale at the end to ensure you make a profit. Big ticket items like Rolex watches can carry a profit of $1,000 to $2,000 on the average. Finding a dropshipper isn’t difficult. Simple go to your favorite search engine and input “product name dropshipper” or “product name wholesaler” and you should be able to find a good place to set up with. Most wholesalers do dropshipping, you just have to ask.

Find your items, find out how much it will cost you to put an auction, figure in your shipping fees and Ebay fees and you should be able to start bringing in good money on  a weekly basis and still have good quality time to spend with your children.

The idea of starting your own home business may seem daunting at first, but it isn’t always as difficult as you may think it is.

Some home businesses can be started with only a small to moderate investment required for your initial setup. Thanks to the internet, there are a number of avenues for you to find, start and run a successful home-based business. All you need is a home computer, determination and the willingness to put in the necessary time and effort it takes to build your business.
Some examples of easy home businesses you can start are:

Freelance Writing Services
If you have an aptitude for writing, then you can offer your services online in a number of ways. There are many opportunities you can find online, where various sites need content written. They are willing to pay a specified amount of money per word or per article. There are other sites where you can bid on freelance writing projects, which means that you compete with other writers and offer the price or fee you would be willing to accept to write material requested by clients. If you are a consistently good writer and garner a competent reputation, the likelihood is that you will be in higher demand and get regular writing gigs.

It takes time to establish yourself, but once you do, freelance writing can be very lucrative.

Running an Online Store
You can set up your own online store, promoting and selling your products and services to others. For instance, if you are good at creating crafts, you can build an online store that shows photos and descriptions of your work, along with the amounts you want to sell them for.

If the thought of having to set up a store by yourself seems too hard to do or if you don’t have any products to sell, don’t worry. There are several “turnkey” online stores you can sign up for. These e-commerce stores already have pre-designed sites stocked with products and services. In most cases, a price has already been set and you receive a commission on any products sold from the site they provide you with that has your special ID. You can sell anything from digital products to business solutions to retail products or whatever else you desire to sell.

Usually, you have to pay a fee, but you shouldn’t have to pay anything over $75 and, in many cases, you can get an online store at no cost.
You will have to do a lot of marketing, both online and offline, to get people to come to your site, so be prepared to do a lot of aggressive promotion. Once you get visitors to come to your site, however, then you can earn some very handsome commissions whenever they make purchases.

Translating
Do you speak another language other than English? If you are competent in a language, such as Spanish, French, Italian, etc., you can offer your services to online businesses to do such things as translation of documents, writing their content in a foreign language, etc. There are even some software programs, such as Power Translator Professional and Systran, for example, that may assist you, as well. You will probably have to pay anywhere from $60 to $125 for this software. You’ll also need to set up a website, where companies can come to you directly and order your services.

As our society grows more pluralistic, there is a growing need to reach potential customers or clients in a language they can better understand. Also, many online businesses want to capture an international audience.  Because of this, translation services can be a profitable enterprise.

Auction Services
Ebay is just one of many online auction sites and there is a lot of money that can be made, not only selling your own items, but selling items for others. You can help people who have items they’d like to sell on Ebay and/or other auction sites, but who simply don’t have the time to put in to do so. Offer your services for a fee to post items on their behalf.

Ebay even offers a Trading Assistant Program to help you get started. You will first need to already be a member of Ebay yourself and establish a solid, positive reputation as a consistent seller in order to be a participant. Once you sign up for the Trading Assistant Program, your services will be listed in a directory, so that people can find out about your reputation and contact you to sell for them.

You can make excellent money selling things for other folks on Ebay and other auction sites

There Are More!
There are many more easy home businesses that you can find online, if you do a little bit of research to find out about legitimate opportunities. Making money from them, despite the current volatile economy, is not out of reach for anyone who has the desire, fortitude and motivation to make them work.

Being a stay-at-home mom or dad can be very rewarding. You may also desire to work, in order to bring in extra income to your household or to have a sense of accomplishment. However, the prospect of having to go outside your home, in order to achieve this goal, may be unsatisfactory to you.

The good news is…you don’t have to!
You can find work-at-home employment, giving you the opportunity to work on a flexible schedule by setting your own hours, without compromising quality time with your kids. Some home-based jobs stay-at-home parents might consider include:

Customer Service Jobs
There are many companies, both large and small, that hire people to work from home doing customer service work. This can involve a number of things, such as calling clients, answering questions from customers and the like. These positions are usually independent contractor positions that pay a set rate per hour and you will need to feel comfortable with dealing with people over the telephone. Having standard home office equipment, such as a computer, printer and fax machine are a must and you’ll probably need to get a second ‘phone line, specifically for giving and receiving business-related calls.

Writing
You probably have a lot of ideas and opinions regarding parenting. Why not put them in writing and earn money doing it? Certain online sites, such as AssociatedContent.com and ReviewStream.com will pay you to write about the things that interest you, product reviews, etc. The pay isn’t huge, but the more you write, the more you earn and it can lead to more lucrative future writing gigs. The great thing with these income earners is that you don’t necessarily have to be experienced and you can write at any time and work your schedule around your family. It’s actually one of the easiest ways there is to make money from home. It is important that you write on a consistent basis and that you be able to express yourself clearly. Be careful with spelling and sentence structure, too.

Tutoring
Are you a whiz when it comes to helping your kids understand their school work? Other children may benefit from your “smarts”, as well. If you are qualified, you might be interested in applying to be an online tutor at sites such as eSylvan.com and OnlineLearning.net, for example, where they need certified teachers to tutor students in specific fields. They usually provide training before you get started and when you do go to work, your schedule is flexible, since you can schedule sessions with students morning, afternoon and during evening hours. You’ll need to apply online for a tutor position and, if you are chosen, they will provide your more information on what they currently pay.

Pet Sitting
If you have a love of and way with animals, pet sitting might just be the kind of job you’d enjoy. A lot of pet owners don’t like leaving their pets home alone when they go to work or have to travel. Print out a flyer offering your pet sitting services and ask if you can post it in places pet owners generally go, like veterinarian offices or pet stores. Charge a fee per hour and limit the number of pets you are willing to look after at one time. You’ll need to make sure you have adequate pet food and water at your home for these animals and, in the case of dogs, you’ll probably need to walk them on a regular basis. Before you agree to watch any pet, however, make sure that their temperament is safe, especially since they will be around your children. If you build a good reputation as a pet sitter, chances are that word-of-mouth will help increase your number of clients.

The Field Is Wide Open!
Those are just a small sampling of the home-based jobs out there waiting for you to find them. You can enjoy the best of both worlds…working from home and still being able to spend the time you want with those you love most!

Working from home has several advantages, such as allowing you to be your own boss, having a flexible time schedule and being able to spend more quality time with your family. There is, however, one disadvantage and that is that there are some things (and people) that can often become disruptions, making it hard for you to concentrate on doing your job.

The main disruptions you may have will probably come from those closest to you- your family

Kids running around the house, arguing, talking loud and interrupting you can cause you to lose your focus.   If you have toddlers, you may want to see if you can get a trustworthy adult to come sit with them during your work hours, to prevent them from disrupting you. If you have school-age children, plan your working hours for when they are in school, so you’ll have free time to spend with them once they get home. Another option may be to get up in the wee hours, when everybody is still asleep and everything is quiet, to work. That way you can stop or take a break in the mornings to eat breakfast with your kids, fix lunch or handle any household chores that need to be done.

Your husband or wife may think it’s perfectly okay to just walk in your home office at any time and start a discussion, launch a complaint or demand attention when you are at your busiest with your work-at-home job. Explain to him or her that you are working now, but that you want to be able to fully focus on what they have to say. It’s probably a good thing to set aside a specific time of day to spend with your spouse and let him or her address any issues they have, so that they don’t feel ignored or slighted.

Friends can be a big disruption as well. If they are used to telephoning you whenever the mood strikes, it may be a difficult habit for them to break. They may even be insulted when you won’t make the time to talk to them when they call. Like your family, your friends also may not understand that what you are doing is as legitimate a job as if you were going to work in an outside office. Share with them what you’re doing and give them your work schedule, so they will know when you will have time open to talk.
Working from home can be a good experience, once you help those you care about adjust to your new situation.

It’s really just a matter of using diplomacy, setting the appropriate boundaries and standing your ground.

• Earlier this year I talked about creating a small business website. Those posts are helpful provided you already have a business. But given the economy, there are a considerable number of new people who may be looking for business ideas they can run from home.

Running a business from home has its blessings, but it also has some negatives. As part of this series you will want to read Monday’s post: “Beating Work at Home Disruptions”. Not everyone is good at the solitary life working at home can mean, so before you decide, it’s good to know as much as you can about what to expect.

Before you decide what business you want to run from home, you should take an assessment of your skills, personality traits and think about the things you like to do. One of the toughest challenges you can face as a home entrepreneur may be staying motivated when sales are slow and the money isn’t flowing as fast as you would like. You need to enjoy your business enough to continue even when it’s not profitable yet. It also helps to have a plan – a type of road map to follow – so you don’t get off-track. We’ll talk more about this later.

To help you consider ideas, we’ll talk about “The Best Work At Home Jobs for Parents”  on Tuesday. If you have young toddlers running around or only a few hours to devote to your home enterprise, you’ll want to carefully consider businesses that can help you capitalize on the time you have available.

If you have never run a business before, you should know it’s a lot harder than earning a paycheck. For that reason, you may want to consider fairly simple businesses to start while you learn the ropes. To help you, we’ll suggest several “Easy Home Businesses to Start” on Wednesday.

There are about five specific business models that are ideally suited as Internet businesses you can run from home in your spare time. You may want to grab a copy of Yanik Silver’s Moonlighting on the Internet, where he described those five business models:

1. Information Marketing – creating digitally delivered information products.
2. Selling products on eBay
3. Affiliate Marketing – promoting other people’s products online for a commission.
4. Setting up shop online via Yahoo Stores or an e-Commerce Store.
5. Blogging

We’ll tell you more about information marketing and affiliate marketing in future posts. On Thursday, we’ll share  “Three Ways for Stay-at-Home Moms to Make Money on eBay“. 

And we’ll conclude this series with “Ways to Monetize Your Blog” on Friday. So bookmark this blog, join our email list or sign up for our blog feed.

Don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know how this series helped you narrow down your ideas. We’d also like to hear what other topics you would like to read about on this blog. Thanks for visiting.