People are making money selling precious and semiprecious Gemstones stones from home. If this is not new information to you; good for you. If you're like me and you are looking for profitable online home based business opportunities listen up.
Gemstones are used in many applications from industrial diamonds to decorative jewelry. Search engine results for the word gemstone return a wide variety of dealers. But if you use Google's keyword tool you find there are several possible subcategories of interest that may turn out to be a great home based business niche.
Over 50 species of minerals can be cut into gemstones for common use. From birthstones, to raw stones there are wide varieties of stone selections.
Amethyst gemstone is a frequently searched keyword phrase that has very little websites competing for it. Something like this would be a great start for niche research.
If you look at some of the websites that sell precious stones, you notice that most try to educate the consumer. Stone saturation, hue, and color are the basics of determining the quality of the stone.
You can find a profitable Internet Marketing niche through advertising or through you're own Gemstone home based business. If you do decide to pursue gemstone, sales as your home based business find out who your competition is. You are no competition for those in the commercial rough cut stone industry. The circle of "seasoned" dealers and jewelers is tight and people have to pay their dues to get in. If you try to compete with seasoned professionals, you will be stressed over how difficult it is to sell stones and even more at how small the profits are.
A great niche for Gemstones would be "custom designed jewelry" with custom cut stones. With the way jewelry has been in the public eye people are always looking for something unique.
Another good niche is one of a kind stones. If you find one of a kinds or limited quantity stones, you can set your price. People that know their stones are less likely to bargain if they know what you have hasn't flooded the market.
Build a reputation for one of a kind jewelry designs and continue to let the industry see your work. If you want to trade commercial rough-cut stones you may want to sell parcels (these too should be stones in limited supply). There are numerous Internet forums strictly for Gemstone dealers and traders. Become a member of as many general and stone specific forums as you can and post daily with your website link in your signature.
Online gemstone dealing is not much different from any other online business in the area of website optimization. You will still need people to visit your website so it would be wise to use as many optimization strategies as possible; one being marketing via articles. Writing 500+ word articles about gemstones and posting them to numerous article directories will over time create backlinks to your website. If your article content is interesting enough (which it will be) it will create traffic to your website. In some cases others will use your article on their website also. With added website traffic you are able to incorporate affiliate sales, pay per click advertisements, etc as well as selling your own product.
Dealing in gemstones is another terrific online business opportunity that over time will generate an income that could allow anyone earn a substantial full or part-time living.
Will is the developer of ServicesAreUs, the website for information on Search Engine Marketing and how it is used to monetize various online business opportunities..
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Targeted E-commerce - Advanced Tips for Get Started With E-commerce
Through this brief article, you are provided with advanced tips for getting started with targeted e-commerce. Equipped with this information, you'll be able to make money through targeted e-commerce, not only today but well in the future.
The first advanced tip that you need to keep in mind when it comes to getting started with targeted e-commerce is the development of an appropriate targeted e-commerce plan. You cannot embark on a e-commerce and effort blindly. Know what you want to do and how it is done. What segment of the population are you targeting? Be sure you meet their needs.
The second advanced tip that you need to keep in mind when it comes to getting started with targeted e-commerce is making use of consultants and specialists. You need to understand the targeted e-commerce can be rather technical in nature. Therefore, you are best served by engaging the services of various professionals who can assist you in your endeavor.
The third advanced tip for getting started with targeted e-commerce is developing a marketing plan to ensure that your efforts are promoted appropriately and well coordinated. Do not undervalue the necessity of an appropriate marketing plan when it comes to embarking on a targeted e-commerce efforts.
Taking these three small steps will help you develop your e-commerce plan. Take some time before you embark on this campaign to understand all the ramifications of your actions. By identifying those markets or those market segments in which you will succeed, you'll be well on your way two increasing your revenues.
The first advanced tip that you need to keep in mind when it comes to getting started with targeted e-commerce is the development of an appropriate targeted e-commerce plan. You cannot embark on a e-commerce and effort blindly. Know what you want to do and how it is done. What segment of the population are you targeting? Be sure you meet their needs.
The second advanced tip that you need to keep in mind when it comes to getting started with targeted e-commerce is making use of consultants and specialists. You need to understand the targeted e-commerce can be rather technical in nature. Therefore, you are best served by engaging the services of various professionals who can assist you in your endeavor.
The third advanced tip for getting started with targeted e-commerce is developing a marketing plan to ensure that your efforts are promoted appropriately and well coordinated. Do not undervalue the necessity of an appropriate marketing plan when it comes to embarking on a targeted e-commerce efforts.
Taking these three small steps will help you develop your e-commerce plan. Take some time before you embark on this campaign to understand all the ramifications of your actions. By identifying those markets or those market segments in which you will succeed, you'll be well on your way two increasing your revenues.
Be Smart - Organise Your Day
If you're running a business from home, whether online or offline, you need to be even more disciplined than if you were commuting to a job elsewhere.
There are so many temptations at home to distract you from work. Family, radio, television and personal or household chores are all things that may take you away from your business tasks. In order that these distractions don't become your whole day, you must organise your time.
Design a schedule for each working week and day, starting at the beginning of the week with a To Do List. If you don't normally work at the weekend, perhaps you could get a head start on the week by just jotting down things you need to do as you think of them. If you need to hang up the washing, collect the kids from school or go to the dentist, build those activities into your schedule. Depending on the type of business you run, any of the following might form part of your working day, in no particular order:
Correspondence
Accounting
Filling orders
Issuing or paying invoices
Stocktaking
Acquiring or creating stock
Training
Attending meetings
Networking
Encouraging and mentoring teams
Promoting
Business development
Let's take an online business as an example where there are things you will need to do on a daily or weekly basis.
Reading and answering emails: This may include admin emails from any affiliate programs to which you belong, responding to queries from your downline and answering contact messages from your website. In addition to that, you will need to dispose of spam and save important correspondence. Only you know what volume of correspondence you receive, but let's say that you need 30 minutes per day for this activity.
Accounting: In this category, you'll be recording expenditure and income for income tax purposes and also for gauging ROI (return on investment) in terms of advertising. This will probably amount to around 15 minutes daily.
Networking: You may have other networkers, prospects, co-members of an online program or a downline with whom to network. Don't miss out on this important aspect of building your online business. Visiting a forum or an online conference room can be invaluable in branding yourself, making your presence felt online and increasing your opt-in list as well as exchanging news and ideas with like-minded people. 30 minutes a day for this should be about right.
Training: You must never stop learning, so make at least an hour a week to attend an online seminar, read some articles or swat up on your Javascript or html.
Promoting: You need to attract people to your website or affiliate program, so this time should be spent posting advertisements, surfing traffic exchanges, sending mail to safelists or whatever methods you use to publicise your business. This will take another 1 to 2 hours per day.
Business development: This category includes building or improving your website(s), writing articles, compiling your newsletter, checking out the opposition in the same field and looking at your statistics. I hope that you are using a tracker so you will need to check your stats to see which adverts or web pages are doing best. Try split testing a page or advertisement by using a tracker like Hits Connect. Find out what works and what doesn't. Check your Adsense account to find out which is the most effective ad placement and type. Use their Channels to do this and experiment with different placements, types and sizes. This raft of activities can all be time-consuming so allow at least five hours a week. You will also be creating new advertisements and banners plus splash pages for those traffic exchanges.
If you have a major project on the go, like building a whole new website, you may want to make a separate plan specifically for that, breaking it up into management chunks, each of which you can complete in the time that remains each day, once the daily tasks are finished.
If you don't make a plan, you'll end up chasing your tail, wondering what it was you were meant to be doing next. If you do make a plan and find that you have significantly more time allocated to household chores than to working your business, you may want to sit back and think whether you really want to do this. It does take discipline and dedication!
Liz helps newcomers to the world of internet marketing with tools, tips and training from her Liz-e-Biz.com website.
There are so many temptations at home to distract you from work. Family, radio, television and personal or household chores are all things that may take you away from your business tasks. In order that these distractions don't become your whole day, you must organise your time.
Design a schedule for each working week and day, starting at the beginning of the week with a To Do List. If you don't normally work at the weekend, perhaps you could get a head start on the week by just jotting down things you need to do as you think of them. If you need to hang up the washing, collect the kids from school or go to the dentist, build those activities into your schedule. Depending on the type of business you run, any of the following might form part of your working day, in no particular order:
Correspondence
Accounting
Filling orders
Issuing or paying invoices
Stocktaking
Acquiring or creating stock
Training
Attending meetings
Networking
Encouraging and mentoring teams
Promoting
Business development
Let's take an online business as an example where there are things you will need to do on a daily or weekly basis.
Reading and answering emails: This may include admin emails from any affiliate programs to which you belong, responding to queries from your downline and answering contact messages from your website. In addition to that, you will need to dispose of spam and save important correspondence. Only you know what volume of correspondence you receive, but let's say that you need 30 minutes per day for this activity.
Accounting: In this category, you'll be recording expenditure and income for income tax purposes and also for gauging ROI (return on investment) in terms of advertising. This will probably amount to around 15 minutes daily.
Networking: You may have other networkers, prospects, co-members of an online program or a downline with whom to network. Don't miss out on this important aspect of building your online business. Visiting a forum or an online conference room can be invaluable in branding yourself, making your presence felt online and increasing your opt-in list as well as exchanging news and ideas with like-minded people. 30 minutes a day for this should be about right.
Training: You must never stop learning, so make at least an hour a week to attend an online seminar, read some articles or swat up on your Javascript or html.
Promoting: You need to attract people to your website or affiliate program, so this time should be spent posting advertisements, surfing traffic exchanges, sending mail to safelists or whatever methods you use to publicise your business. This will take another 1 to 2 hours per day.
Business development: This category includes building or improving your website(s), writing articles, compiling your newsletter, checking out the opposition in the same field and looking at your statistics. I hope that you are using a tracker so you will need to check your stats to see which adverts or web pages are doing best. Try split testing a page or advertisement by using a tracker like Hits Connect. Find out what works and what doesn't. Check your Adsense account to find out which is the most effective ad placement and type. Use their Channels to do this and experiment with different placements, types and sizes. This raft of activities can all be time-consuming so allow at least five hours a week. You will also be creating new advertisements and banners plus splash pages for those traffic exchanges.
If you have a major project on the go, like building a whole new website, you may want to make a separate plan specifically for that, breaking it up into management chunks, each of which you can complete in the time that remains each day, once the daily tasks are finished.
If you don't make a plan, you'll end up chasing your tail, wondering what it was you were meant to be doing next. If you do make a plan and find that you have significantly more time allocated to household chores than to working your business, you may want to sit back and think whether you really want to do this. It does take discipline and dedication!
Liz helps newcomers to the world of internet marketing with tools, tips and training from her Liz-e-Biz.com website.
What to Look for in a Tracking Tool
Tracking is absolutely essential to online business. Without it, how will you know where your website visitors are coming from? Are they arriving because of your amazingly provocative email campaign, your fantastically interesting article submitted to article directories or through one of your favourite traffic exchanges or from a website with which you have exchanged links? If so, which email, which article, which directory, which traffic exchange, which website?
So, we know that we need a tracking tool but which one do we choose and what are the criteria that are important to you personally when making that choice?
Here are some points to consider:
Cost - This needs to fit within your own business budget. The most fantastic tool, which meets all your needs, may cost $100 a month but if you only have $20 set aside for tracking and you can sign up for something which meets 90% of your criteria, wouldn't that be a better bet?
Campaign Quantity - There is usually a limit to the number of tracking campaigns that you can set up. Do you know how many you need? Don't forget to leave room for expansion.
Campaign Usability - Be sure to use a tracker which gives you the facility to create just one campaign per advertisement which you can use anywhere by putting a different parameter at the end. For example if you want to advertise a splash page in the traffic exchanges, you don't want to have to create a different campaign for each exchange. You need to end up with something like www.myurl.com/ILH (signifying I Love Hits) and www.myurl.com/TS25 (for TS25) and so on.
Your Domain - Some trackers provide a script which means that you can use your own domain name as part of your tracking url. Obviously, this increases the exposure of your domain and makes your tracking urls look more professional than those which just use the tracker company's url.
Rotators - Having a rotator available for split-testing web pages is a great bonus. If you're not sure which of your splash pages is the more attractive or successful for use in the traffic exchanges, you can just upload your rotator url to the exchanges, put your pages for testing into the rotator and check the results. You can change them round whenever you want and experiment with different graphics or text.
Statistics - Not only do you need to know the number of hits to your site or signup page, but you need to know where the hits are coming from, the referring url and preferably the ISP as well. You may also want the facility to trace how many sales conversions you received from each site where you uploaded your advertisement. If you post your advert to six classified ad sites and receive conversions consistently from only three of them, you may not want to bother using the other three.
Other Stats - As well as actual numbers, you may want to know what time of day is most popular for, say, clicking links in emails so that you can despatch your email campaign accordingly. You may want to know the browser type your visitors are using so that you can make sure your pages look great in that browser or you may want to know how many of your hits are unique and how many are from repeat visitors.
Only you can decide whether you want a few or all of the above from your tracking tool, but if you want them all, I recommend Hits Connect.
Liz helps newcomers to the world of internet marketing with tools, tips and training from her Liz-e-Biz.com website.
So, we know that we need a tracking tool but which one do we choose and what are the criteria that are important to you personally when making that choice?
Here are some points to consider:
Cost - This needs to fit within your own business budget. The most fantastic tool, which meets all your needs, may cost $100 a month but if you only have $20 set aside for tracking and you can sign up for something which meets 90% of your criteria, wouldn't that be a better bet?
Campaign Quantity - There is usually a limit to the number of tracking campaigns that you can set up. Do you know how many you need? Don't forget to leave room for expansion.
Campaign Usability - Be sure to use a tracker which gives you the facility to create just one campaign per advertisement which you can use anywhere by putting a different parameter at the end. For example if you want to advertise a splash page in the traffic exchanges, you don't want to have to create a different campaign for each exchange. You need to end up with something like www.myurl.com/ILH (signifying I Love Hits) and www.myurl.com/TS25 (for TS25) and so on.
Your Domain - Some trackers provide a script which means that you can use your own domain name as part of your tracking url. Obviously, this increases the exposure of your domain and makes your tracking urls look more professional than those which just use the tracker company's url.
Rotators - Having a rotator available for split-testing web pages is a great bonus. If you're not sure which of your splash pages is the more attractive or successful for use in the traffic exchanges, you can just upload your rotator url to the exchanges, put your pages for testing into the rotator and check the results. You can change them round whenever you want and experiment with different graphics or text.
Statistics - Not only do you need to know the number of hits to your site or signup page, but you need to know where the hits are coming from, the referring url and preferably the ISP as well. You may also want the facility to trace how many sales conversions you received from each site where you uploaded your advertisement. If you post your advert to six classified ad sites and receive conversions consistently from only three of them, you may not want to bother using the other three.
Other Stats - As well as actual numbers, you may want to know what time of day is most popular for, say, clicking links in emails so that you can despatch your email campaign accordingly. You may want to know the browser type your visitors are using so that you can make sure your pages look great in that browser or you may want to know how many of your hits are unique and how many are from repeat visitors.
Only you can decide whether you want a few or all of the above from your tracking tool, but if you want them all, I recommend Hits Connect.
Liz helps newcomers to the world of internet marketing with tools, tips and training from her Liz-e-Biz.com website.
Get Paid For Taking Online Paid Surveys?
More and more people nowadays are getting interested to get paid for taking online paid surveys. Generally, online paid surveys are conducted by market research companies who would represent one or more businesses which have hired them to handle all the details in relation to surveys. The whole concept of these companies is that they find qualified participants, conduct the survey and then compensate the participants as well as validating and compiling the results provided before reporting these information back to their clients. This allows the companies to plan their product development and launches, while the survey takers get paid for taking online paid surveys.
Before you can get paid for taking online paid surveys, most companies require you to complete a screening questionnaire that may have questions about the job you do, your responsibilities, where you live, if you either own or rent your home and other such information. These questions then help the marketing company to determine if you are really qualified in order to participate in the surveys that they conduct. Any information that you provide to these companies would be for their own companies use and nobody else.
However, you may find there are some companies which do not require you to take part in a screening questionnaire and you will be automatically accepted by them to take part in any online paid surveys in the future. As far as you can see, the whole process is simple enough for anyone hoping to get paid for taking online paid surveys.
Usually once someone has been accepted to participate in the surveys, they would be sent questionnaires pertaining to various products and services that they may use (or that they might use in the future). You will then need to provide them with your opinions on them as well as any experiences that you may have had with them. In some cases you may find that the marketing company will send you a free sample of the product in order for you to use it and then provide them with an honest evaluation of it. Once the job is done, you would then get paid for taking these online paid surveys either in cash or other rewards such as shopping vouchers, dining vouchers and so on.
With some online paid surveys, you may find that they are very short and do not take very long to do, while others may have more questions and so would take a longer time to complete. However, what is important is that when you are answering any of these online survey questionnaires, you are completely honest with your answers so that the survey results can be unbiased and accurate.
As you can see from above, getting paid for taking online paid surveys can be a certainty. Such surveys are pretty easy to participate in and all you really need to know is whether you are able to provide the time in order to complete them honestly and within the time frame that they are required. Anyone who is keen to try out online paid surveys can visit my survey blog for more information.
Davion is a successful online entrepreneur who goes hunting for the hottest income opportunities. Discover where to find the best paying free internet paid surveys at his wildly popular survey blog. You can also find another interesting article on internet paid surveys and start earning some extra cash today.
Before you can get paid for taking online paid surveys, most companies require you to complete a screening questionnaire that may have questions about the job you do, your responsibilities, where you live, if you either own or rent your home and other such information. These questions then help the marketing company to determine if you are really qualified in order to participate in the surveys that they conduct. Any information that you provide to these companies would be for their own companies use and nobody else.
However, you may find there are some companies which do not require you to take part in a screening questionnaire and you will be automatically accepted by them to take part in any online paid surveys in the future. As far as you can see, the whole process is simple enough for anyone hoping to get paid for taking online paid surveys.
Usually once someone has been accepted to participate in the surveys, they would be sent questionnaires pertaining to various products and services that they may use (or that they might use in the future). You will then need to provide them with your opinions on them as well as any experiences that you may have had with them. In some cases you may find that the marketing company will send you a free sample of the product in order for you to use it and then provide them with an honest evaluation of it. Once the job is done, you would then get paid for taking these online paid surveys either in cash or other rewards such as shopping vouchers, dining vouchers and so on.
With some online paid surveys, you may find that they are very short and do not take very long to do, while others may have more questions and so would take a longer time to complete. However, what is important is that when you are answering any of these online survey questionnaires, you are completely honest with your answers so that the survey results can be unbiased and accurate.
As you can see from above, getting paid for taking online paid surveys can be a certainty. Such surveys are pretty easy to participate in and all you really need to know is whether you are able to provide the time in order to complete them honestly and within the time frame that they are required. Anyone who is keen to try out online paid surveys can visit my survey blog for more information.
Davion is a successful online entrepreneur who goes hunting for the hottest income opportunities. Discover where to find the best paying free internet paid surveys at his wildly popular survey blog. You can also find another interesting article on internet paid surveys and start earning some extra cash today.
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