Friday, August 7, 2009

On The Web, Your Web Host Is Your Partner. Choose Wisely.


Want to Work At Home?

Start Looking for A Web Host

We could all use a little more “walking around” money, but most of us are overworked and underpaid or, we’re stay-at-home parents who can’t go to a daily job. So, the only way people like us can ensure that our income matches our outgo is to get a work-at-home job.

Let’s Start With What Doesn’t Work

Anything you see in the newspaper or the back of magazines on making $$$ while working at home is most likely a scam. You’ll have to buy some kind of “kit” required to do the job and you’ll never hear from the goons who scammed you. If anyone is recruiting you to work at home for them, run for the hills.

What Does Work?

Your energy, enthusiasm and your need for more cash each month can lead to a profitable business – an on-line business. Don’t know anything about the world wide web? That’s not a problem. Today, anyone can own a web business without taking out a second mortgage on the house.

The Benefits Of An Own On-line Business

Low start-up costs

Really, you can have a nice, professional-looking web site up and running on-line for less than $100. True. The web hosting industry is highly-competitive so web hosts (they’re the ones that hook up your store to the web) have to provide a lot of services for a little money. So start looking for the right web host – a host that delivers enough digital space for your enterprise, the tools needed to build a site (it’s all done with templates, just pick and click) and run a site. Go with a web host that offers low monthly fees but packs a wallop with a trunk full of freebies.

Passive Income

If you already have a job, or you’re chasing after the kids all afternoon, you don’t have hours a day to tend to another business. No problem. Once you get your site set up, whether you’re selling products or services, you can automate the entire transaction process from purchase to shipping to customer satisfaction.

Now, don’t think you can just open a little cyber storefront and it’ll generate enough for you to move to the Riviera. If only it were that easy. You will have to spend some time taking care of business but you can minimize that level of participation. What’s even better? You can work when it’s convenient. Put the kids down for a nap and you’ve got an hour to process some orders or handle customer queries. Someone’s got to do it, but there are pop-in software modules that’ll take care of everything from building a great looking storefront, to processing and tracking orders, to shipping and handling, to customer queries.

So, you do have to spend some time running that on-line business but you pick when and how often.

Right Place. Right Time.

The world wide web is the fastest growing medium ever. Faster than newspaper, radio or even TV, which changed our lives in profound ways. The W3 is growing in importance to commerce at a truly phenomenal rate.

That means you’re entering the fastest growing market in the history of the world. Billions are being spent by on-line advertisers who now recognize that the interaction with our computers is much more engaging (addictive) than channel surfing for something – anything – to watch passively.

The web delivers interactivity, billions of pages of indexed text in search engines and the almost irresistible urge to communicate and interact with the rest of the world.

Risk Versus Reward

Always a crucial consideration when starting up a business. How much risk are you taking in order to reap the reward, i.e. the big payoff? In the case of an on-line business, your downside risk is limited to $100 if you do all of the work yourself – and these days you don’t have to know anything about web design to build and run a website.

You can earn a few extra bucks each month to make life a little easier or you could become the next youtube.com, which was sold to Google for $1.6 billion and it had only been on-line for two years!

Okay, it’s not likely that your idea for an on-line business will sell for a billion bucks, but it is likely to deliver some extra earnings - whether it’s a hundred dollars or a couple of thousand – each and every month.

It’s Not Brain Surgery

That’s a fact. There are a lot of dim bulbs on the web who are working at home, naming their own hours and making a living, or at least supplementing the family income.

Start by coming up with the right idea for you. It should be something about which you’re passionate, something you love because you’re going to spend a lot of time working to build your home-based, web-based business.

Next, find the right web host. Shop around. A lot. You can even get free web hosting as long as you’re willing to display the web host’s paid advertising on your “free” site. Not a good way to go.

Find a web host that doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg for a monthly subscription (less than $10 a month is good). Some excellent web hosts cost even less than that. Finally, look at the tool box the web host offers. Does it have everything you need to build and run your on-line business? It should, and you should be able to get all of this for less than you spend at a fast food place for a family dinner.

Build It and They Will Come

There’s software today that does everything but suck up the dust bunnies behind your computer. Site builder software. Merchant account software (so you can accept credit cards). Checkout software with built-in security. Software to measure your site’s performance, start your own blog, advertise and market your web site. There are dozens and dozens of software packs that make it easy to build and run an on-line business. Your kids could administer the site. (Well, maybe not the four-year-old but who knows?)

Here’s the key distinction between work-at-home jobs: if they’re coming after you, you’re about to be scammed. If you’re working to build an at-home business and you started it all on your own, you have to consider the world wide web for its risk versus reward equation.

No, it’s not easy but nothing worth having ever is. You will have to work at it. Pay attention to it and oversee daily functions – on your schedule. And that’s what makes the difference. It’s your business and you receive the benefit of your hard work and solid marketing instincts.

You can do this. For pocket change, just to test the waters. And if you start growing and becoming more profitable, you can gradually build your on-line presence from a small storefront for your hand-made ceramics to “Sue’s Ceramics Barn, Best Prices on the Web.”

Hey, it could happen. The simple fact is, you’ll never know unless you try.


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