1) As a mom, you are able to stay home with your kids, which is great! However you feel a sense of longing to do something more with your day. Something that would allow you to use your gifts and talents from home. Something that would not take you away from the kids, but would enable you to earn money from home!

2) Or two, you do not have a choice; you have to work full-time or maybe even multiple jobs. You would do anything to be home with your kids more and still make a great income from home at the same time!

Yet you hear about all those ‘Home Based Businesses’ and sometimes you have to wonder, are they real? Can I really make money from home? Will those people really help me learn how to make money? The answer is yes and no. Yes there are real (good) companies out there that will work with you, teach you and assist you to build a business from home. BUT beware; some companies are not on the up and up. You deserve to know which is which!

While the following is not an exhaustive list, you will find several valuable resources that will be helpful in your research for a solid, legitimate Home Based Business idea. I am not directly affiliated with any of the following resources; however I have found them helpful and referred many people to them over the years:

Direct Selling Association — here you can learn the history of the home based business, statistics on the industry, a list of what to consider when assessing any given company. They will even help you directly to evaluate companies

Home Business Association — if you are more interested in a ‘job’ you can do from home, this site offers many links to companies looking for people to do work from home. Know this, while most of these opportunities are real, they won’t necessarily make you a full-time living from home; maybe a few hundred dollars per month, which can be great if that is all you are looking for. However, if you are looking for a way to earn several thousand dollars per month or more, there are better ways to do it, with a solid Direct Sales company or some affiliate programs and other Internet based companies

Visit MoneyMakingMommy, yet another reliable home business idea web site, if you are looking for a ‘job’ you can do from home.

MLMwatchdog, is an MLM Company Scam Review site. It is always a good idea to do your due diligence before joining any company or home based business program. MLM watchdog has been a valid resource over the years to provide the latest MLM scam reviews. It is also a good idea to crosscheck this site with any companies you’re strongly considering before investing your money and time.

Success to you in your search for a Home Based Business; hopefully the resources I listed will shed some light on what to look for and what to avoid. If they can save you from throwing your time and money away on a scam and empower you to make an informed decision about what business you choose, I will be a happy camper! It warms my heart to see a mom be able to stay home with her children, to be a part of their lives and make a great living from home on top of it! You can have it all!

There are many talented people teaching Network Marketing on the internet but for the most part they are teaching instead of doing. As a good friend of mine says, ‘those who cannot do, teach.’ After reading some of these reports which have been launched with such marketing hype I have found myself sucked into the world of the marketer, totally buying everything they say as I go along with them. At the end of the report there is usually a call to action of some type, as with any effective marketing. It often takes the form of a study course of some description which will ‘transform your business’ and you will never be the same again. Some of these courses may cost as much as $2,000, $5,000 or even $10,000. Usually you will receive many compelling emails over the next few weeks explaining exactly why you need to invest in them. Of course these marketers know that most people prefer to learn than to take action so it is a perfect recipe for the guru to profit and the desperate network marketer to go broke.

The ironic thing about this is that many of these gurus talk disparagingly about the heavy hitters’ in your upline who ruthlessly sell you DVDs and business tools to make money from you the poor innocent victim team member. Almost in the same breath they then very artfully move in for the kill with their own products, which incidentally have very little to do with your opportunity. The frustrating thing about this is that people are then distracted away from their job at hand and totally lose focus on their goal which should of course be building their own residual income cheque, not someone else’s database!

This leads us into the new report by Rich Schefren about the Attention Age doctrine. He quite correctly points out that people are so distracted on the internet by an overload of information that the online world today is so competitive that one needs to work much harder to grab a prospect’s attention. I don’t disagree with much of the information in his report but as a sponsor who is committed to helping my group develop their skills which are relevant to the business they were introduced to I find it irritating that so many of these gurus are offering solutions that quite frankly involve spending a lot of money and offer a way to create a business model or system which most team members have neither the time nor the financial resources to be getting involved with and is completely unrelated to the business they have signed up for.

I have been a follower of Mike Dillard’s Magnetic sponsoring ethos and find his information newsletters useful and of interest. The fact that Mike is such a compelling marketer has of course led to a complete saturation of his materials on the internet so that he has now changed his approach which is interesting. His new Online Community is a way to connect up with lots of other like minded people in our industry. The catch 22 is that there are now thousands of network marketers all trying to sponsor each other and claiming to have a winning system for success. The reality is that many of them wouldn’t have the first clue how to create a system that others can duplicate. It’s all very well being an ‘expert’ and being ‘unique’ and learning how to create websites to attract people to you but what happens when you bring someone into your business who has just 10 hours a week to build it and they are not very techno savvy, nor do they have $1000 to spend on their education? They have after all just paid to join your business with the belief that you will be able to give them access to a winning system. Unless you are a hi-tech whiz, at the most you will have created a blog or your own website. What system will you be passing on to your new recruit?

You may come full circle and discover ‘The Death of Network Marketing,’ by Mike Filsaime and Ellie Drake. You may think as I did, ‘well it’s alive and kicking where I am!’ Of course we are now recommended to spend hours in darkened rooms with glazed eyes as we learn and apply the strategies of Web 2.0. No sooner will we have mastered those techniques and actually started exposing our business opportunity than we will be told that Web 2:0 is dead and we’ll need to sign up for another report, order yet more courses and e-books only to discover that we are going back to basics and are now allowed to actually go out into the real world and sponsor people over a cup of coffee! Well I don’t know about you but that sounds really attractive to me and I shall be spending some time in starbucks being sociable and doing some real life networking.

Randy Gage has mastered the industry and is one of the most successful leaders in the field. Interestingly enough he actually is out in the field, not just reporting from the sidelines. He did spend many years as a consultant where he helped real people develop systems that could be duplicated to create passive income for huge teams of people. Now he is actively working as a distributor and teaching us the secrets of duplication, he says that to create true residual and then passive income, the kind which will keep hitting your bank account when you are retired and sitting on the beach in Fiji,(regardless of the the latest ‘Google slaps’) we need to have a large group of people taking a few simple actions over a consistent period of time. So why do we complicate it so?

In all of the reports and online ‘manifestos’ that I have read I have not yet once come across something that is actually simple for a team member to implement and be up and running and earning income the same day. There are good strategies… that is for sure, but an actual system? No. I for one am going to stop complicating my business and am going back to basics. I am a great admirer of internet communication systems and I certainly will continue to leverage the tools that I have access to but next time you decide to ‘go off on one’ I urge you to take a little inventory. Ask yourself some questions such as ‘How duplicatable is this for my new team members?’ ‘Is this something that a large group of people can do over a consistent period of time?’ If not then leave the latest hot report where it is and give your upline leader a call and ask them to bring you back to the centre line! If your opportunity is not one that you can be proud of in the real world then hiding behind a computer screen is not the answer. Maybe you should be partnering with a group that have a proven and attractive system for you to follow immediately, that is after all why we join Network Marketing in the first place!

autoresponders can help you accomplish both. You can bolster your marketing and increase profits by implementing an autoresponder system.

How it Works

An autoresponder is simply a program that automatically sends a message in response to e-mail from a client or potential client. The first autoresponders were messages notifying the sender of an e-mail that their message could not be delivered. You probably have received these a few times.

Today’s autoresponder systems can be simple or complex, depending upon your individual needs. There are two types of autoresponders you can use.

Outsourced ASP

This is a pay-for-service autoresponder, and is the most common type seen on the market. It is also the easiest to use, especially for those who do not have a lot of technical know-how.

You subscribe to a service and decide what you would like your messages to say, and how often to send them. The service does the rest. The cost varies depending upon how complex you decide to get.

Server-Side

These autoresponders are ones you establish and control on your own, using your own server. These are not seen as often, and require a good deal of technical knowledge on the part of the user. Companies that have their own IT departments or people who have a good deal of programming knowledge may find these types of autoresponders useful.

There are also two different types of autoresponders you can send out. One has the appearance of bulk mail, usually addressed to “Dear Customer,” or “Dear Sir.” You can send these out en masse, fairly easily.

The other type is the personalized autoresponder. If you are e-mailing to your list, these have a more personal touch. With this type of autoresponder, you are addressing your client or potential client by name, giving your business a friendlier feeling.

What the autoresponder Can Do for You

autoresponders provide several important marketing services. First, you can provide multiple exposures of your product to potential clients. The average person needs to see your product a minimum of six times before converting to a paying customer, and autoresponders can accomplish this for you.

You can use autoresponders to give an immediate reply to your customer when they decide to buy. Following up immediately with your customers gives your business credibility, as well as providing a personal touch. Both of these things will greatly increase your chances of keeping your new customer and having them make repeat purchases from you. Especially when you are operating an internet based business, loyalty cannot be underestimated.

Finally, autoresponders allow you to get your message or advertisements out at a far lower cost than mass marketing. With an autoresponder, you are replying to a current customer or someone who has expressed an interest in your product or service. For these reasons, you are targeting someone who wants your product, rather than just taking a blind shot in the dark. autoresponders for marketing purposes can help save you money in the long run.

There are many reasons you should consider implementing autoresponders as part of your customer service or marketing programs. Examine your business and your individual marketing needs, and decide whether autoresponders can work for you.

Easy enough, a “blub” is merely a term coined as using a person’s “blog” as being somewhat a central point for one’s online business which is commonly known as their “hub”. The simple and straight forward reason for this is that many people often do not think of their blog as really being a place in which much of their business can be centralized.

Blogs can make a great place for having a centralized point because it gives a lot of interaction between customers and subscribers of a business’ or marketers list a place to communicate directly on a more personal level. Many people go there to seek advice, or ask questions of the expert or product owner and get to know and trust them in a much more personal environment.

For the blog owner it gives him/her a great opportunity to brand themselves as experts in their field. A lot of the time, readers of certain blogs are looking to the owners for answers to certain questions. There is no better place than a blog to get the feeling of some good “one to one” interaction with your audience.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not but in 2007 we saw more and more top marketers utilize their blogs in some amazing ways. They have used them for introducing videos, or audios, in the whole process of creating buzz for their new and upcoming projects and products. It’s become a medium that is being utilized more and more because of the level of comfort it brings between themselves, and their fans, or readers.

Targeting your traffic to your blog in which you are using as a hub for your business is very important, and there are a few tools available recently that help in this regard hugely. Until recently most of these tools could not find blogs that weren’t using “no follow” tags in their pages. Wordpress blogs hosted on the company’s servers have always carried the tags and it wouldn’t do any good in terms of improving your SEO posting on these blogs.

The Groovytastic Blog Digger, which is now available fixes this problem. It will seek out blogs based on keyword research, which will find not only your target market for your hub but also help because now you can get links going back to your blog, that are going to count in the search engines. The cool thing about this tool, is that it ONLY seeks out blogs that don’t use the “no follow” tags. The guess work of whether you are visiting a blog that is going to help with your rankings is gone. It’s a great tool to be using for finding the right customers in the right places.

One of the absolute best ways in which I’ve personally found to use my blog is for helping train other people in areas in which they have interest. Of course this may not work for all niches, but for me personally, I’m in the IM Niche.

Many of the readers on my blog are new to marketing online, and need a helping hand in knowing reputable sources for acquiring knowledge that will count in their efforts. It is a great way to help people, because it will save them from making a lot of the same mistakes that I have already personally been through.

It’s become acutely prominent to me of just how much knowledge I actually have to share with people because of mistakes. In a sense, although not knowing at the time, my past mistakes have been an ally in terms of learning how to market. Now, because of those mistakes people can benefit. It’s a great way to build trust with your readers because of what you share. It will also help you to sell more products because the trust you have built up, goes a long ways in terms of them purchasing your recommendations.

Using your blog as the hub for your online business gives you the chance to brand yourself as the expert in your chosen niche. Now is the time to begin to utilize your blog in this way. It will serve you well for many years to come!