http://www.articletrader.com/ Articles at ArticleTrader en-us http://www.articletrader.com/business/career/work-from-home-ideas-and-how-to-find-them-online.html http://www.articletrader.com/business/career/work-from-home-ideas-and-how-to-find-them-online.html Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500
The result of an Internet study reveals that hundreds of searches take place on a popular search engine related or regarding work at home business ideas in one minute. Other search engines experience similar activity, where people are trying to find ideas for different work at home schemes.

The reason for this heavy search whereby people are willing to work at home rather than on regular jobs is quite simple, home based businesses provide them the freedom and flexibility to do other important activities in their life, such as spending quality time for themselves or with their families. A home based business also may serves as a source of secondary and residual income.

Start Your Work At Home Search

Experts agree that before starting any home based business, you should do an exhaustive research first about potentially beneficial work at home ideas that may be comfortable to manage according to your taste and abilities. After selecting some ideas, try to eliminate those that you feel are not worth trying to short-listing them even further. Once you have decided on a particular idea, make an extensive research about that work at home idea to understand it even better.

Find out what items or products people are looking for online. You most choose items targeted to your prospects and that also are very much in demand among the potential clients of your work at home business. Choosing low competition but high in demand items will ensure greater profit from your business.

Another effective way to find out ideas to work from home is to use various readily available Internet based research tools. Some of these tools are free to use, with others you will have to pay a monthly fee. These research tools help you find many home business related words and phrases, also known as keywords, that people are searching for online. The key here is to think carefully and wisely before to choose your keywords or idea for your home based business.

Knowledge Is Your Friend

In case that you have some experience about a particular market or industry you had worked previously, you could use that knowledge as a starting point to develop an idea to start your home based business. Indeed, if you were working as a writer for a magazine or newspaper, you could establish an online copy writing or editing business. It is a good idea to develop a home business based on a career or activity which you have already executed or have some experience.

Conclusion

While establishing a home business some issues may act as obstacles. Some of the main road blocks that you might be afraid off are loss of money, scams and unfamiliarity with online businesses. However, one of the most common issue many people encounter before starting a home based business is the lack of specific ideas to work from home.

It is crucial to decide on an idea to work from home that you feel comfortable doing it and are interested in developing. There is not much sense to start a home based business which you do not feel attracted to, or tend to lose interest later. Finally, to work at home all you need is good decision making ability for a specific idea and additionally, proper marketing skills to promote and ultimately to sell the products or services to the right people.


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Javier A. Garcia C. has been successfully helping entrepreneurs wishing to work from home since 2002. To learn more about Work From Home Ideas And How To Find Them Online, please visit: Takeoffzone.com.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/business/career/a-work-at-home-business-is-not-for-everyone.html http://www.articletrader.com/business/career/a-work-at-home-business-is-not-for-everyone.html Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0600
Isolation

If you live alone, then you will face isolation. With isolation you have no colleague to whom share ideas, consult, or ask for advice. You will need to seek these types of relationships elsewhere. You will find strength looking for people you can relate to for guidance, or just for mingling about your business.

The other challenge to overcome with isolation is that you will have to find ways to motivate yourself. Without much interruptions or a boss to answer to, you need to provide this situation yourself. Interruptions force us to take breaks on us, which in turn, tend to increase productivity. You need to think how you will ensure that you take breaks at certain intervals.

Organization

If you are not an organized person, you will face this problem. When building a business, a plan is a must. This also apply to your marketing efforts, which will be a big part of your tasks when running a business. It must be well planned and executed everyday.

Also you must evaluate the success of your activities and review them every week to have a clear picture about where you stand. If things are not going as plan, revise your plan, and identify what needs to be changed in order to reach your goal. Also it helps incorporating your tasks into your daily activities.

Flexibility

When you work from home you can decide when you work, but might run the risk of sacrificing your own personal time. You need to make up the time somewhere. The work has to be done. You might want to complete it during the weekends, nights, or any other time you wish, but you will find that balancing work and other daily tasks can become stressful and quite challenging.

If you have a family you might find yourself into an argument about the extra time you spend doing work. If you live along, you might run the risk of compromising your personal time. That's why you need to think about where you will place the line between work and personal life. It is a balancing act.

Work

Starting a business means hard work and long working hours. It isn't that easy. Sure, those long working hours are all dedicated toward your own business. It’s also your time and effort, and the work must be done. If you own a business that you love and feel passionate about it, then the work will be more like playing and you'll enjoy doing it, that’s a desirable thing to have. But at the end of the day, you will definitively be tired like anybody else, and sometime feeling like you’re not making any progress. It is here when you will need to adjust your plan and keep going.

Income

It is hard to come by, especially at the beginning. You will need to have a smart business plan, and be able to adapt your plan as you go, particularly when you reach limits, ceiling, and hurdles; which will inevitably happen.

You will need to be well organized, persistent and focused on what you're doing. Income is a bit hard to obtain at the beginning, so what you gain in high income potential having your own business, you'll lose in health insurance, earning security, retirement plans, and other jobs benefits.

Creativity

You'll need to find creative ways to sell, no matter what your business is; be it a product, service, of your own or someone else. You will always have to respond to or please someone beside yourself in order to reach the ultimate goal of earning money. At some point, you will need to balance your income goals, your desire for creativity, and the demands of your clients.

Sometimes your creativity is in sync with what your clients want or in some situations, you’ll need to sacrifice your creative freedom in order to meet your income goals. That's the reason why the needs and desires of your clients will influence how our creativity manifests in the final product and/or service delivery. It’s a matter of balancing your income goals with your desire for maximum creativity results.

Final Thoughts

This article is meant to prepare you for the challenges and difficulties you'll have to overcome when pursuing your dream of starting your own work at home business. I'm not trying to discourage you in any way, instead I want you to be aware of these challenges so you'll know what to expect in advance. Start with ideas that you are good at it and really love to do.

Working at home is hard work. It can be made easier by looking for or creating work that you already know how to do, or that you’re really passionate about. If you make the decision to start your own business, you’ll have to plan how you will handle these challenges. Having a home based business can be exciting but definitively, it is not for everyone.


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Javier A Garcia is a successful Internet marketing expert and editor in chief of more than half a dozen websites available to anyone interested to start a work from home business, or to work at home. With many years of experience in online marketing, website optimization and promotion.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/internet/online-business/do-not-trust-sfi-marketing-group.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/online-business/do-not-trust-sfi-marketing-group.html Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0600
Don't get me wrong when I say: do not trust Strong Future International or SFI Marketing Group (a.k.a Six Figure Income). I have my reasons. But you do not need to agree or disagree with my statement, because what I say it is 100% true fact. Let me explain:

My relationship with SFI Marketing Group began almost 5 years ago, hopeful to building a self-sustainable and profitable home based business, on January 24 of 2003. Six months later I saw my first commission check of $16.50. A little more than a year later, in February of 2004, I was still earning a monthly commission check of around $15.00.

Due to a more diligent marketing effort, after March of 2004 my SFI commission check was gradually increasing up to the point when on July of that year I got a $203.29 payment; effectively covering my IAHBE membership ($29.95) and check ($1.00) fees, so the actual earning was $234.24.

During 2005, 2006 and two months into 2007 payments increased even further up to a point where I was earning around $300 in commissions. Before that time I was achieved a Team Leader status with more than two thousands referral members on my downline.

On January of 2007, SFI owner Mr. Gery Carson unilaterally decided to change the compensation plan of the company. That's when the trouble began. For two consecutive months (February and March of 2007), my commission payment amount drop to around $25, which is not enough to even cover the IAHBE membership fee. So on March of 2007, I decided to cancel my SFI account and forget about the whole SFI/MLM scheme.

Before the new compensation plan became effective, I consistently kept my Team Leader status and was generating an average of 4 new affiliates daily until the day I canceled my account. No to mention that I used to follow up every referral that signed up below me after they achieve Executive Affiliate status and beyond.

They still keep promising residual income:

"income that keeps coming in month after month, year after year, from work you do just once. It's like a royalty; you write a book or record a song and get paid forever on it."

I don't think it is fair that after 5 years doing business with SFI; been able to generated thousands of affiliates, earning almost three hundred each month in commissions; all of the sudden my earning was reduced to a level that was not enough to even pay for the membership fees, just because a change in the compensation plan. It is like starting all over again. The home based business dream felt like a sand castle hit by the waves on the beach.

I'm sure that this change affected many other SFI members, no just me. Even many others admit that were touched by this arbitrary plan change.

My question (which you don't have to answer) is: Where is the "residual income" promise?


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Javier A. Garcia is a successful internet marketing expert and editor in chief of more than half a dozen websites targeted to anyone interested to start a home based business. With many years of experience in online marketing, website optimization and promotion.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/internet/seo/how-to-optimize-your-website-for-better-visitor-experience-and-more-traffic.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/seo/how-to-optimize-your-website-for-better-visitor-experience-and-more-traffic.html Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0600
Compatibility With Web Browsers

It isn't a surprised for website owners, webmasters and others who are involved in their websites optimization, to see how different the web pages are displayed in various web browsers or between different web browsers version. Web pages might not even be visible in some web browsers.

Displaying differences it's the result of how the various available web browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.), or their versions, handle HTML code, HTML errors or computer screen resolution used. Because of the above reasons, I highly recommend to look at your web pages through at least three of the most widely used web browser platforms: Internet Explorer, Netscape and Firefox. Alternatively, you could use the available web based service found in the References and Resources section at the end of this article. (See Anybrowser viewer and Firefox below).

Title and Meta Tags

Meta tags are information inserted into the ‹HEAD›‹/HEAD› section of the HTML code of any web page. There are many type of meta tags. We will be considering only two of them and the ‹TITLE› tag.

From the visitor's point of view, the only tag visible within the head section is the title tag, which is not a meta tag itself, but a stand alone tag found in the head section of the web page. The title tag is responsible of the wording displayed at the top right hand corner of the web browser window. You should always include this tag in order to name your web pages. Think of the title tag as the subject of an email message.

The two most important meta tags are the keyword and description tags which are invisible to the visitor's eyes but should be also included if you want your page information (title and description) to be properly displayed on the search engine result page (SERP) listing. Specially important is the meta description tag.

In the early days of the Internet, one could influence the search result by including keywords within the meta keyword and meta description tags you wanted the search engine (SE) to classify your page for, today you cannot influence the result of the SE by just adding desirable keywords anymore due to the level of complexity the SEs have achieved which are able to analyze your page, decide what is it all about and give it the position in the SERP based on those findings and other external factors, which are beyond the scope of this article. You could do just fine without including a meta keyword tag, but including them won't hurt, on the contrary, I think it would rather do more good than harm.

Keyword tag should contain between 5 and 10 keywords that appear on the body of your page. You should never include keywords in the tag that do not appear on that page. It is worth to say that some SE will penalized your website doing otherwise. Also do not repeat the same keyword to avoid SE penalization. (See meta tags generator below).

The Importance of ALT Tags

Many web surfer and visually challenged people browse the Internet with the image viewing option of their web browser turn off or using text readers respectively. When one of these surfer visits your site containing lot of images, and it happen to be that those images contain most of the content your website is about, they won't be able to read the content of your pages if the images do not contain the ALT="your image description" tags. The same situation applies to the search engines since SEs do not index images, they won't index any text your web site has in image format. ALT tags are essentially image descriptions that always should be added to your images to make sure your visitors and search engines can respectively read and recognize all the content on your website.

Browser Safe Color Palettes

Computer platforms handle color differently, and the web browser limits colors significantly. In order to move through the digital world with consistency, the web page designer must be well aware of this fact.

While in the real world all colors are the result of some subtractive combination of three primaries colors: red, yellow, and blue. In the digital world all colors are the result of additive color synthesis or combination of three primary colors: red, green, and blue, referred to as RGB for short. Additive color is unlike the tangible world's subtractive color.

RGB values are derived from a method that numerically determines how much red, green, and blue make up the color in question. Each color contains a percentage of red, green, and blue.

A safe color palette is a palette containing 216 RGB colors that are going to remain as stable as possible from one browser to another, between platforms, and at different monitor capacities and resolutions. If colors outside the safe palette are used, many web site visitors will see the color the computer has available instead of the color you have called for. In this case if you have asked for a soft, pale blue outside the safe palette, you might end up having visitors who see that color as bright neon. (See web safe color chart below).

Check For Broken Links

Broken links are links that lead to nowhere, and clicking on the link will show you a 404 error code page.
It is said that about 5% to 7% of all links on the Internet are broken. A site that contains broken links, including missing links to images, gives a very bad impression to potential visitors and it is a frequent cause of lost visitors. Also, the search engines and directories might not list your Web page if it has broken links. (See links checker and Netmechanic tools below).

Check Web Pages Load Time

Many Web surfers today browse the Internet through a high speed broadband connection, it is fair to say that those visitors won't have any problem accessing a heavy loaded page document, but a significant percentage of those Web surfers still use slow speed dial up connection to access the Web.

Surfers are known for having a very short attention span and will leave your site before the page finishes loading. You'll lose many visitors and sales this way if you do not pay attention to the loading time of your pages. Generally speaking, the maximum accepted time for a page to load is about 10 seconds, and it is recommended that your page to be around 25Kb in size.

One easy way to calculate the net size of your web page is by using Windows Explorer to find the file of your HTML and any graphic it contains and looking to the size value for each file involved then adding those numbers to get the size of the page in question.

Decreasing the loading time of a web page can be easily achieved by both, compressing or shrinking the size of your images, and reducing the size of your HTML code. You will lose some sharpness after compressing the image more than 40% but you'll gain in speed. Below you'll find more practical ways to further decrease page loading time, keep reading. (See load time checker and image cruncher below).

HTML Code Optimizer

An HTML Optimizer removes all blank spaces in your HTML code, and this is another way to make your page load faster. The result is shorter downloading time. Pages will be shown in a client's browser in exactly the same way, but the file size will be smaller.

Please make sure that the HTML optimizer you use does not compress embedded script codes within your page, which might be rendered unusable if they get optimized this way. (See code optimizer below).

BORDER, HEIGHT and WIDTH Attributes

The attributes used with the ‹IMG› tag to specify an image width and height are the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes indicating the exact size of your image in pixels. The other attribute that influences the way an image is rendered on the user's screen is the BORDER attribute, which should be set to zero if you don't want your hyperlinked image to show a blue border around it. There is not need to specify BORDER="0" for a normal, non-hyperlinked, image since no border appears around an image unless that image is a link.

One interesting advantage to adding the height and width attributes to an image tag is that when you do specify the image size for all of your images, browsers take a lot less time to render your page because the browser can determine the layout of the page without having to retrieve each image separately to find out what size it is. To find out the width and height of an image, just open it with any image editor and look for its property.

Validate Your HTML Code

Just as texts in a natural language can include spelling or grammar errors, documents using markup languages like HTML may, for numerous reasons, not be following these rules. The process of verifying whether a Web document actually follows the rules for the language it uses is called validation, and the tool used for that is a validator. A document that passes this process with success is called valid and complies with a specific set of rules.

Different browsers, or versions of the same browser, will make different guesses about the same illegal code; even worse, if your HTML code is really bad, the browser could get confused and produce a mangled display mess, or even crash. Validating your HTML will help ensure that it displays properly on most browsers. Always check the validity of your HTML code.

Look for a very versatile validator tool in the References and Resources section at the end of this article, which is able to analyze your web pages directly from your server, by file upload, and direct document code input. (See validation service below).

References and Resources:

ANYBROWSER VIEWER: http://www.anybrowser.com/siteviewer.html

FIREFOX BROWSER: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

IWEBTOOLS METATAGS GENERATOR: http://www.iwebtool.com/metatags_generator/

WEB SAFE COLORS CHART: http://www.virtualpromote.com/tools/colorchart/

IWEBTOOLS LINK CHECKER: http://www.iwebtool.com/broken_link_checker/

NET MECHANIC TOOLS: http://www.netmechanic.com/products/maintain.shtml

NETMECHANIC LOAD TIME CHECKER: http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/FutureQuest/load_check.htm

SPINWAVE IMAGE CRUNCHER: http://www.spinwave.com/crunchers.html

HTML CODE OPTIMIZER: http://www.iwebtool.com/html_optimizer/

W3C VALIDATION SERVICE: http://validator.w3.org/

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Javier A. Garcia is a successful internet marketing expert and editor in chief of more than half a dozen websites targeted to people interested to work from home and in online business resources. With years of experience in online marketing, website optimization and promotion.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]>