Make Money with a Home Business Setup

A great way to earn cash online is to get it from running your own home business that's set up to work from your own websites and blogs.

The reason for this is that websites and blogs are like shop windows facing out into cyberspace, where a virtual customer base that could potentially number in the millions is available for you to display your products and services to.

This article takes an overview look at the benefits and pitfalls of setting yourself up as a home business person using the Internet as your source of income.

Easy Way, Hard Way

The easy part is building those websites and blog. The hard part is getting them to be seen by that huge consumer base. That's where the search engines come to the rescue.

The only problem is knowing how to get your websites and blogs to feature prominently in the major search engines, by which I mean Google, Yahoo and Bing plus a few others. To do that and do it successfully time after time with all of your websites requires not just an in-depth knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but also a pretty large contact and network base.

No problem, I hear you say. Just get onto the social sites and start making lots of cyber friends and they'll all come running to see my websites and blogs! Well, that part will be true at least. You'll certainly get plenty of visitors to your sites that way.

Can Social Traffic be Monetized?

But will this social traffic buy any of your own or affiliate products, or even click any of your ads?

No, they will not! That's mainly because all those people that sign up to the social sites are bloggers much like yourself. The downside of this is that they're all trying to chase a dream that doesn't exist.

They're all trying to attract each other to their blogs in the same deluded hope that that more visitors will equate to more sales. This is clearly self defeating, because if they're all like you, then would you buy a product or a service, or click a PPC link from one of them?

If you're honest with yourself, you'd have to answer that you would not. Why would you want to give someone else a commission on a product that you have your own affiliate id for, when you can use it to keep the commission for yourself?

PPC Ads

Similarly, if you are displaying Adsense ads on your sites, then you know full well that you must not under any circumstances click on them or you might get banned. That carries on to every other site you visit, because you would naturally be wary of clicking any Adsense ads.

This means you'll have to re-think that strategy for attracting visitors, although you can still gain some benefit from social contacts. You can exchange links with them to help boost the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) authority, which will go some way to improving your position in the index. More SEO will be needed, but that is a topic for another post.

Making a Website Work

The central core of a good and successful Internet business strategy is to have one or more highly optimized websites that will, when all other things are equal, be sufficiently well built to satisfy the search engines criteria for quality and usefulness.

That's the way search engines are heading in terms of ranking sites and with the latest rounds of algorithm updates from Google, seems to be the sensible way forward.

Not only does your site need to be visitor friendly, useful and informative, it also needs to load quickly and be engaging enough to keep a visitor on the site for some time. Bounce rate (the speed at which a visitor lands on and then leaves your site) is a ranking metric as is page load speed, get these two things right and you can improve your site's serps ranking.

Site loading times are affected by the quality of its host, so if you are serious about this you need to make sure you have good quality and fast web hosting (click that link for more details). Images and video all slow down a site, as do plugins if you're using a CMS (Content Management System) such as Wordpress.

Just be mindful of how a site uses its server's resources and you'll end up with a faster, more streamlined site that keeps visitors where you want them!

All in all, running your own work at home business is not the easy thing you first thought it might be. There is plenty of work that needs to be done before you'll start seeing the benefits.

But it's worth all the hard work, because in the end you will reap the rewards of your efforts and be able to see success as you earn cash online from your home business set up.