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Grow Your Online Business in 2011

In today’s post I want to present some ideas you can use to grow your online business in 2011.

After all…. what good is an online business or any other business for that matter if it doesn’t ever start growing or continue to grow?

Not much of a business at all I’d say.

Some time ago, I added a (1) question survey in the right hand widget bar of this blog asking readers to help me get to know them so I could better understand how to help them.

The majority of people answering the survey all say the same thing: “I’ve been trying to earn money with Internet Marketing for a while now but have earned very little.”

My answer to you is, don’t feel like you’re the only one. As a matter of fact you’re in good company with approximately 96% of online start ups in the same predicament.

But know that you have an outstanding opportunity, particularly this new year of 2011, to do something about it.

Good SEO will always be a factor but as long as you’ve been doing your homework you should really be starting to get a grasp on that department by now. Even if you’ve hired an SEO consultant you still must always keep a hands on approach and stay up to date with new and fresh SEO ideas and techniques.

The real force to catapult your online business in 2011, however, will be a sincere and devoted effort to connect with your niche peers and your potential customers.

In a year when social networking is almost at it’s peek you simply can’t afford to miss out on the connections being made available to you.

If you’re serious about growing your online business this year then you need to reach out and touch a lot of people using all the tools at your disposal.

Blog more, spend more time building your Facebook network, Tweet more, email more, go to more conventions, make more phone calls, text more, read more, comment more and so on.

When things get stale, and I promise they will, it’s ok to change it up a bit. Just be sure to keep multiple lines of communication open with your peers and your customers and stay close to the topic of your business.

Don’t be afraid to reach out and communicate with others. On the contrary, you should make every effort to connect with, help and learn from as many as possible.

In the words of Jack Humphrey, author of the very successful blog Friday Traffic Report, everything we do is about getting attention on the web. We’re all great at being social for personal attention but seem to have a disconnect when it comes to being social about our business. You can read the full article Traffic Equals Attention: Your Goals for 2011 and maybe it will help put things into perspective.

If you truly want to grow your online business in 2011 then start it off right by making a conscious decision, or even a habit, to connect your business socially with the online world.

How to Measure Success

Before one can measure success it seems plausible that we should define success first.

The term success means many different things to many different people.

For example, Joe and his wife are in their 40′s. They have two kids and live very modest. The couple is extremely happy earning a hundred and fifty thousand in there 7th year at their family restaurant. They have a nice home and don’t require much to be perfectly content in life. There is always plenty extra money if something is needed or wanted.

Sara, however, is a single 30 something lady and earns closer to seven hundred thousand a year from her 4 year old interior design company. She loves what she does and has made a name for herself. Sara enjoys a more extravagant lifestyle with multiple houses, flashy cars and a few beach side vacations a year. She seldom has much disposable income around when it is needed and seems to be always buried in credit debt. Sara is thrilled living her life in the fast lane and could not be happier.

Then you have Jacob and Katie. They’re a young newlywed couple with no children in their early to mid 20′s. They started their own internet business a year and a half ago. They both work hard on their shared business. Jacob and Katie are on track to earn forty thousand dollars net in the second year. Both drive older cars which are paid off and they live in a small apartment that cost them 650.00 a month plus utilities and food. They are completely beside themselves with joy and go out and do whatever they want whenever they want.

Which of the people out of the three examples above are more successful?

The answer would be that neither is more successful than the other.

They are all doing what makes them happy.

The best part about it is they are earning money from what makes them happy.

Their success, however, is not measured by how much money they’re earning but instead measured by satisfaction in the lives they are leading.

Money is well and great and certainly needed but we can’t measure our success with it.

Success has to be about something more important than money.

Best Wishes!

The Future of Internet Business

One doesn’t need to have a crystal ball to predict the future of Internet Business. All you need to do is take a look at Internet World Stats to determine that there are now currently 1.7 billion Internet users in the world. The numbers are consistently rising and you can see that it has already reached 1/3 of the world population.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the Internet has long been here to stay. People pay their bills online for goodness sake.  They also use the Internet to perform research, purchase goods and services, send and receive email, play games, watch tv, listen to music, download music, get local and International news as well as many other daily chores and tasks.

The Internet is our way of life now. Security has become better and reliable as more and more people have begun to accept the Internet as a normal necessity. The growth of the Internet has also spurred many new business opportunities for regular everyday average families. You don’t have to be rich anymore to start your own business. People can start and run a profitable Internet business for less than it cost to eat out for one night.

I predict in the future we will see more and more Internet businesses begin to emerge and flourish. We have still only scraped the surface. Most people are sick of the hustle and bustle world we used to live in. Everybody is searching for a way to stay home with their families and earn a solid living. The Internet is a real answer for many.

It doesn’t mean you won’t still have to work hard. Whether online or offline, if you’re going to build a viable and profitable business you are going to have to work hard. That’s just the way it is. Any sane person knows this. You get out of it what you put into it.

Those with an entrepreneurial mindset can certainly see this and have jumped at the chance to make their dreams a reality with an online business. Shame on me for not setting up my own business sooner than I did. Where else can you touch so many people at one time? You can’t. The Internet is a gift to mankind. It is not to be wasted.

Best Wishes!

Web Hosting For Business

Article by:  Akinori Furukoshi

www.thatswise.com

If your web site is sitting on your hard drive, it won’t do you one bit of good or make you any money. You have to publish your web site. You have to look for a host. A host puts your site on the web, so your web site is available for web surfers 24 hours a day 7 days a week. But choosing the right host is a little tricky. Learn from my painful and costly mistakes, and pick the right host for yourself.

Free hosting
I started with a free hosting service. I thought, “Why do I have to pay when I could get it for free.” Right? Wrong!! Their server was down periodically, once a week or so. One day, it became inaccessible. I couldn’t see my web site, I couldn’t log into my account. No support was available. About 6 month later, the server sent me an e-mail which said they had shut down the business. The worse thing was I didn’t have any backup. The server had had an online html editing tool. Earlier I had logged onto my account and edited my site, so all my files were in their computer. Unfortunately, I never made my own back up file. When that host was gone, my web site was gone too.

Cheap hosting
I got a little smarter. I picked a cheap hosting service. I thought again, “Why do I have pay more when I could get it cheaper?” Right? Not really. It was OK at the beginning. All of my web pages were able to be downloaded in 8 seconds with a 56k modem. Once in a while it slowed down. Sometimes it took more than a minute to download! Then once in a while became almost every time. When I started considering switching the host, I got an e-mail that said they would shut down the business. This time I got the notice a month prior to the shutdown. Again, I had to find another hosting service. Finally, I decided to pay extra for reliability. Since then, I don’t have to worry about my site is up or down. A reliable host definitely takes your headache away.

Domain name
My hosting mistakes ended up not being all mistakes I made. I also didn’t have my own domain name. My domain name read www.freehost/myname or myname.freehost.com. My plan had been when I made a little money, I would buy my own domain name. Then I would redirect visitors from my free-host domain name. That plan didn’t work. Every time my host shut down, I had to promote a new URL. I lost all previous visitors. They had no way to find out what my new URL was. I wasted time and the money I had to spent on promoting the URL. If I had bought my own domain, I could have kept my previous visitors at least when my host shut down. On top of that problem, I learned that web surfers can tell you are using free hosting service from the URL you have. Having folks know you are using a free hosting service makes it very difficult to earn credibility, and credibility is THE key to making sales in syberspace.

You don’t have to buy the latest equipment and spend beaucoup money on every top-notch service, but do pay for your domain name and a good hosting service at least. You can’t afford cheap stuff. Really!

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