Why bother with a home business credit card ? Well…..from a tax and accounting perspective it is important to separate your personal income from your business income.

This also applies if you have multiple businesses. Keep a separate set of accounts for each business.

Once you have separate accounts setup, accounting for all the revenue and costs for your businesses becomes a whole lot easier.

The same applies to your credit card (or cards). Don’t make the mistake of putting your business expenses on a your personal credit card.

Having a separate credit card is handy for any home based internet business. Most of the products for sale online today require a credit card for payment. This especially applies if your advertising with the larger PPC programs link Adwords.

We run three separate accounts for our online home business:

• An ordinary savings account where Adsense earnings are deposited, along with cheques for affiliate earnings.
• Our Paypal account where earnings from suppliers prepared to deposit into Paypal are accepted, and where we pay as many of our costs as possible (Being based in New Zealand it helps minimise exchange rate fees).
• The final account is a separate credit card account. This pays the Adwords bills and covers for times when Paypal is not accepted. All debits on this account are paid within 30 days of the cost being incurred. This ensures that no interest is paid on purchases.

In choosing a credit card for this purpose there are a couple of things to take into consideration:

• Since you pay off the credit card each month, the interest rate is of little importance.
• Find a card with low fees or no annual fee. By being careful with your credit card selection you can hold your costs for the card to an absolute minimum

For more information:

• No Annual Fee Credit Cards
• Lowest APR Credit Cards – if you don’t intend to pay off your expenses each month

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

When you start out its difficult to determine what the best structure allows you to best take advantage of the home based business opportunities you wish to promote.

One question almost everyone works through is the number and size of the web sites that you put together.

Here are some notes from my experience which I hope will help you when the time arrives for you to answer this yourself.

The lower the competition the smaller the website can be.

We have a small site we put together for a member of the family. They sell a real world niche product.  There is almost no competition for this product in their geographic area (or indeed in New Zealand as a whole). A small website with a few links, the right page titles, page urls and H1 tags has been enough to keep them close to the top of the first page of Google for as long as it has been up.

I did some paid SEO work for an associate in a similar situation with similar results.

Where there is little competion a simple site a little tweaked for the search engines, appears to perform very well. In this case there is little  need for regular updates, sitemapes etc etc. In other words this is set and forget stuff.

Age of the site is also not too much of an issue. A brand new site will rank quite well for less competitive terms.

For heavily competitive niches its quite a different story.

Sites seem to need to be of a reasonable size (more than fifty pages), need to be well SEO’ed, have a steady stream of fresh new links pointing at them and need to have regular content updates.

To get decent rankings for a competitive term it usually takes six months to a year until the point is reached that the size of the traffic stream is enough to justify all the investment which has gone into it.  The age of the site does seem to affect its ability to rank. The older the better.

Content update is especially important if you use social networking to attract visitors.  Traffic does rise and fall with update frequency.

Maybe we leave a lot of money on the table, but we are more and more focussing on using passive traffic generation (natural search) for the majority of my traffic. Two reasons for this. Firstly we aim to build online sites which mave minimal maintenace so we are free to develop more sites. Secondly, natural search has converted a lot better for me than other traffic generation techniques.

You can sometimes get a fresh site to rank for keywords with medium competition. However I’ve found that they will jump up the rankings, then if they dont get regular links and fresh unique content they drop right back down again and the ongoing traffic is minimal.

For competitive words you really need a big site which has thousands of links scattered across the net. Directories, Articles, Social Media, YouTube, Images, Blog Comments, Technorati Favorites, Press Releases – you name it you need links in all these places.

There is another phenomena which others have commented upon and which I’ve observed myself. After a certain point a good site will become almost self sustaining. The site is large enough to attract new links just because its there. Search engine rankings become quite stable and ranking for new terms of medium competition (long tail and a bit above) becomes relatively easy.

Trouble is this point is a bit like a stock market bottom – no one rings a bell when your there. I was once told that when you get over 400 visitors per day on a regular basis your site has become established. That seems to be close to the mark for competitive terms.

In Summary

Your site strategy needs to match the competitiveness of your keywords. Highly competitive keywords need big sites, less competitive terms don’t need anything fancy at all.

What you target is really a matter of what fits your style. Our preference is to target competitive terms, take time to develop the site knowing that there is a high probability of success and that once established the site will remain strong or quite some time.

One last observation. The rumours are true. Sites with high content (unique written material) seem to do better that those with flash graphics. In fact some of the most profitable sites we have looked at have had the simplest of layouts.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Using the YouTube API and a PHP script you can make a site which displays a collection of YouTube videos. Great for displaying videos about a niche and as a way of adding extra value to your readers.

Here is an example of a video site about Learn Buddhism

There is documentation on the YouTube site to explain how to do it, but unless you have a good feel for PHP or another scripting language, then your unlikely to crack the code.

Google search doesn’t yield immediate results for complete scripts. There is some partial information but again some programming skills are required to effect a working site.

If you decide you want one of these sites here are a few places to find them:

GamePacs.org

phpYouTube Video Script

YouTube Video Script v3

AutoVideo Script

There are listing in the following forums on a regular basis: DigitalPoint, NamePros

What I look for in a video script:

• No database required. Script should pull results straight off Youtube. Means there will be less of a load on your server and the results will always be current.
• The demo has lots of pages indexed – by lots I mean thousands. This proves search engines find it easy to spider.
• Check the title and h1 tags on individual pages. Make sure the title on each page is the same as the keyword that its is targeting. This helps ensure the page ranks as high as possible in SERPS.
• Ensure you have total control over the keywords the script is pulling videos for. With some script you can only enter one keyword and they work out variations.
• Open source is preferable but not essential. Makes customization easier
• Uses the new YouTube API. Ask if its not obvious from the script description. The older API wont be supported much longer.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Christmas stocking fillers will soon be on the minds of almost everyone around the world. This is an opportunity for you to add to your home business income.

All sorts of products which don’t usually get a lot of traffic start developing huge traffic spikes over this period.

If your looking for some products to promote over Christmas, then the eBay 2007 Hot Holiday List is a good starting place.

Here the top 25 hottest eBay seller are listed. They provide a good indication of what people will be looking for over the Christmas period.

We can be sure that if people are searching for these products on eBay then they will also be looking in other places.

Now is the time to get your campaigns going for Christmas. Here is the eBay list as it stands today

1. iPhone
2. Webkinz / Lil’Kinz
3. Transformers
4. Collectible Barbie
5. Dooney & Bourke Zebra Tote
6. Nintendo Wii
7. T.M.X. Friends – Ernie & Cookie Monster
8. BCBG Dress
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
10. Rock Band Video Game
11. iPod nano 8GB (Black)
12. The Simpsons
13. PlayStation 3
14. I’m Not A Plastic Bag
15. Motorola RAZR2
16. Designer Fragrances
17. Citizen Eco-Drive Watch
18. Nike Air Max 360 II
19. Abercrombie & Fitch Hoodie Jacket
20. Dept. 56 Snow Villages
21. Nike SasQuatch Sumo2
22. Gibson Electric Guitar
23. Craftsman Hand Tool Set
24. Burton Snowboard
25. Vtech Gadget

And here is the link to the list for future reference.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

A little while ago WordPress 2.3 came out, so I decided to attempt the WordPress 2.3 upgrade on a few of my blogs.

There are a number of features I wanted to try out and we have a policy of always keeping to the latest version.

With this release there are also a number of new features that looked interesting including:

• Tagging support which allows tags as well as categories to be allocated to posts.
• Upgrade notification of plugin and WordPress upgrades. Not so worried about WordPress as this is well publicised but getting notified about plugin upgrades is really useful
• URLs have been tweaked to make them cleaner for search engines
• WYSIWYG editor has more features.

The team at WordPress make a few suggestions about preparing for an upgrade. They are:

• Back up your blog. Here is the Codex page with a few different methods.
• Check for the latest versions of your plugins. Here’s a list of known compatible and incompatible plugins with 2.3, Google Sitemaps seems to be one causing a lot of issues. (Forum thread.) Upgrading might get you cool new features anyway. Don’t forget about the plugin directory.
• Read up on how to modify your theme to add tag support.
• Consider switching your install to use Subversion to make updating ultra-easy.

Having done a few upgrades now, the number one issue to be checked is plugin compatability.

If you don’t check your plugins and one isn’t compatable it will either shut down your site or more curious will shut-down admin access.

So, I’d suggest checking the plugins, then disabling them before upgrading.

Once the upgrade is done bring them back one at a time.

By bringing them back one at a time, if there is a problem you know which plugin caused it. Then you can just FTP into the /contents folder and delete the offender to get up and going again.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

When choosing a web host its almost impossible to separate the fact from the fiction in terms of the quality of the services offered. It is especially hard to determine the most reliable web hosting service

There are many good articles about what to look for in a new host, but very little in the way of hard cold comparisons of actual performance.

We have hosting from three hosts, all selected after following the usual advice to determine the best option for our circumstances (entry level hosting).

The three host option was chosen to ensure:

• If one host went down our whole business was not affected
• To improve SERPs by interlinking from different IP blocks
• To gain some experience of the performance of different hosts

To provide further robustness the last hosting selected was a Hostagtor Reseller plan. This plan was selected because it allows you to setup multiple accounts on one host. If one account needs to be disabled by the hosting supplier (Digg etc) then other accounts are not effected. Contrast this with single account plans which are cheaper but would result in all sites on that host being disabled.

Here is a summary of the web hosts we use:

 
Earlier this year we decided to measure the reliability of a sample of our sites using the free Montastic Service. It simply pings each site once every 10 minutes, then provides an email/rss alert for change of state.

The following is a summary of the reliability we experienced for February 2007.

As you can see Hostgator had no downtime and although this is on a reseller plan, its reasonable to expect that the lower priced plans would have the same performance.

We had to contact the help-desks for both Hostgator and Dreamhost for issues related to the scripts we were running (Our problem not theirs). Both offered very good responsiveness and quality of response.

When reading this post its important to remember that the above is just our experience. The results across the whole client base for each of these hosts may be quite variable. Our experience may not be typical.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Earlier this month Google announced another enhancement to their Adsense program. Its called targetable custom channels.

It works a bit like this:

• Each Google Adsense ad-block can be allocated to one or more “channels”. These are used to track the performance (including earnings) for the ad-block.
• This allows the publisher to experiment with colour, placement and Ad type to determine which combination works best for each site.
• Usually Ads are allocated to random Ad-Blocks by Google.
• Now, with targetable custom channels, advertisers can choose to locate their ads within a specified location on a publishers site.

There is a bit of debate about when and if this offering will be effective.

It seems Google has taken a step to slow the growth of competition like Text-Link-Ads et al, who already broker fixed placement ads for publishers.

Its interesting that Google recently changed their TOS to exclude placement of competing advertisements with the same look as Adsense.

With Google rounding out its portfolio it clearly has the scope to slow the growth of any medium competing for its advertising dollar.

Even though the internet advertising market is growing, Google will be keeping a weather eye on market share and move to ensure it is not eroded by competing new offerings. This is perfectly normal (and expected) behavior.

And in a paragraph of pure speculation, a potential future development from Google, is a sponsored posting option. Instead of an ad with a headline and a few words, you will be able to buy a few paragraphs or a whole blog post. With the rise in popularity of blogs, sponsored posting is maturing and becoming an accepted practice.This is just like text-link-ads were a few years/months ago. It would be simple for Google to also implement this into their portfolio.

Now lets talk about the Publishers. Will this work for them ?

Obviously it wouldn’t be smart to immediately implement this blog wide. There just won’t be enough advertisers interested and this isn’t what the product was designed for. Revenues would plummet.

However for small pieces of prime real estate, a custom channel should drive bidding higher than it usually would be.

Suspect that in the medium term this is only a viable option for large, high traffic sites. The further up the SERPS the better this will work for you.

This development is good for advertisers who want to be specific about where their Ad is to be placed. By being able to target location provides, another tool to improve hit rate. Prime spots get more traffic. If they have deep enough pockets they could remove their competition from key positions by simply out-bidding them.

In summary the new offering will take some time to bed down. Both publishers and advertisers will take time to work out the wrinkles.

As a publisher a small trial in a hot spot is the way to start out.

For Advertisers, look for opportunities to get highly targeted, advertising in premium positions, on very high traffic sites. Will cost a bit more but the results should be worthwhile.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Mompreneurs – Entrepreneurs of the fairer sex. Here are some interesting numbers:

• Women own 46% of privately owned business in the US
• They are  starting  their own businesses at twice the rate as men
• Over 7.7 million US firms are owned by women
• They contribute $1.1 trillion in revenues to the economy
• Their firms create jobs for 7.2 million Americans.

I found this information at Entrepreneur.com and also the Center For Womans Business Research

A lot of the businesses they are creating are online and in support are a nice range of sites catering specifically to this market. These sites offer the Mompreneur support and ideas for starting a new venture, be it online or in the traditional bricks and mortar world.

The good news is that these sites aren’t just useful for the girls. They are also a great resource for all online marketers. They also provide a valuable insight into the opportunities provided by this growing market segment.

You can do a quick Google search to find a whole bunch, but here are a few to get started.

Mompreneur center
Mompreneurs.com

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Over the last year we have focussed on SEO to grow the traffic to this blog. We are just starting to see good results with traffic and revenues lifting (Although it hasn’t been reflected in Alexa raking).

Now its time to look at other methods of increasing traffic.

The most common advice is to build an email list. Having tried this in the past we have decided not to pursue because:

• If your accused of spam, there is a risk your whole online business will be shut down
• Spam filters shut out a lot of legitimate traffic
• The size of your email list cannot be measured in any way by search engines so it doesn’t count towards SEO.

So we have decided to build our RSS feed readership.

In researching best way to achieve this we learned a lot about Feedburner & SEO.

Feedburner is a service which will take your feed, add some smarts then make it available for your readers. There are many options but some of the nicer features are:

• Information about how many subscribers you have (see left hand side of this page)
• Information about how much traffic you get from your feed as measured in clicks
• Ability to include customized information into the feed – could be used for advertising

What I especially like is the ability to measure the number of RSS subscribers. Just having that measure gives the ability to see the results of efforts to grow the subscribed base.

I will shortly include some ads to the feed to encourage traffic back to this site.

Since I have a WordPress blog, setting up the redirection from my existing feeds to the new Feedburner feed as a snap. Just install an automated plug in called Feedburner Feed Replacement

With the tools in place the next task is to find more subscribers. The first step was adding the large orange button at the top of this page so it was really obvious how to subscribe. For the next few months we will increase post frequency and look for every opportunity to grow the readership.

There has been some talk in forums that search engines will start to look at RSS readership as part of their SERP formula. I don’t know if this is the case but with Google introducing it’s Reader (Google Reader) then it is always that possibility for the future.

If you have some views on the above or have some RSS tip’s you would be prepared to share, please feel free to add a comment below.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

When your looking for an idea for the next project or post its a good idea to look around at what others are searching for. Sometimes its just a fun an interseting way to fill in a few spare minutes (I should get out more :-) )

Most of the search engines provide an indication of popular search tems. The following pages provide popular search terms . They are listed in alphabetical order:

• Ask Jeeves
  Popular searches for the previous week.
• Dogpile
  Updated in real time Dogpile provides a scrolling list of searches. There is a filtered (censored) and uncensored version.
• Google Zeitgeist
  The monthly search listings from the worlds favourite search engine
• Lycos Top 50
  Weekly update of the top 50 searches
• Metacrawler
  Provides a glimpse of current searches.
• MSN
  Provides a cut-down list of popular searches in the bottom left of the MSN home page.
• Technorati
  A great page showing popular searches, tags, blogs and videos.
• Yahoo!
  The Yahoo! Buzz Index provides a daily top 20 search list.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.