People make money from home in different ways. In my case, I chose a network marketing business. Others prefer some type of direct selling or home party plan business. Still others make money by mastering Internet marketing skills and selling products and services online directly to consumers.

Unfortunately, not everyone who attempts to make money from home actually finds success.

Earlier this year, a prospect for my business called and wanted to know more about what I was doing. As we discussed network marketing, he admitted that he was somewhat skeptical of the whole thing. He had seen and heard of many people losing far more money than they made. We chatted for a few minutes and then agreed to perhaps talk again later.

He had opted in to our auto-responder follow up system to learn more about our business. Over time, in addition to facts about the products and business itself, we send out success stories about people who have done well with our opportunity.

So, a couple weeks later this particular prospect received an email with a story about an associate who had started from scratch and built a very solid business (full time income) in just two years. This prompted him to call and ask a very interesting and legitimate question.

“I see these success stories, but can’t believe that many are having this much luck. Please tell me why more people don’t make money from home with network marketing or any other home business for that matter?”

There are lots of ways to answer this question. I thought about it for a while, then decided to focus on one particular trait that is common among all successful home business owners that I know.

Here is how I answered the question.

Starting a home based business is a serious venture that requires significant commitment and dedication before getting involved. However, most people don’t come on board with that level of commitment, thus the failure rate appears to be awfully high.

Most home business opportunities don’t cost much to get involved. You can start a network marketing business, with virtually unlimited potential for success, for as little as $100 to $500 depending on the opportunity. Some less. With that level of investment, it can be a pretty easy decision to quit when things get tough. A high level of commitment isn’t really required to “give it a try” in this case.

Compare that to a traditional retail storefront business, started by investing in a franchise. Many franchise operations will cost in excess of $100,000 just to get started, not to mention ongoing operating costs and dealing with employees and related issues.

Anyone who can come up with that kind of money to start a business is going to plan it out and take it seriously from the start. There won’t be any “trying it out”, it will be more like “we will make this work whatever it takes”.

A new franchise owner will likely not make any significant profit for several months. Are they going to be in a position to quit and go try something else? Will they throw up their hands and shut it down if friends and family tell them they are crazy for thinking they can make money with their own business?

Success in home business starts with a commitment to success and doing whatever it takes. With that commitment, there won’t be the option to give up if your check in month three is only $50. There won’t be the strong temptation to quit when a few close friends turn down the opportunity to go into business with you.

It’s all about commitment and making a decision to do what it takes. When you only invest a few dollars to start something, you can easily discard it and never have a second thought.

People fail to make money from home with network marketing, direct sales, Internet marketing, and every other business you can think of. The root cause is often lack of true passion and commitment.

Making a decision to do “whatever it takes” and being willing to grow and learn is the first step.

Are you publishing a home business blog to build your brand and attract visitors and potential prospects for your product or opportunity?

Let’s say you’re consistently blogging and writing articles in order to bring traffic and attention to you and what you have to offer.

Problem is, you may have come up with lots of topics to write about, but are people actually going to read what you write? Are your posts and articles going to build your brand and attract the visitor and prospect that you’re looking for?

Many bloggers and writers go down the wrong path here. They kind of take a guess at what they should write about, or focus just on what they feel most comfortable with. Nothing wrong with writing in your comfort zone, so to speak, but there may be a problem if you always do this. Your content may not be broad and appealing enough to reach the majority of your intended audience.

The challenge is discovering what people are looking for. There is a classic rule of thumb that goes like this:

The best content is one of three E’s – enlightening, entertaining, or educational to your ideal visitor or prospect. Building your content around these three E’s is the key to attracting the people you want to work with or do business with.

Here are some general guidelines that can help you. Think about these things when you are creating the content for your home business blog or articles.

There are four things that people in network marketing or any home business are always interested in:

1) Solutions to a specific business challenge they have.

If you are writing to network marketers, this could be many different things.

• how to overcome fear of making phone calls

• how to approach people you don’t know in a relaxed and non-threatening way about your business

• how to get more leads

• how to work through discouragement

• how to stay “up” when a prized prospect doesn’t sign up, or someone you put a lot of faith in quits

2) General information that they can learn and use to move their business forward.

This can focus on things like creative ways to maintain a positive attitude or specific ways to organize your business activities to make maximum use of time.

For network marketers, you could discuss great opening lines, or models for creating an attention grabbing response when someone asks them what they do.

Or, you could go into new approaches to social media marketing that can help drive more traffic to your home business blog or website. How to prospect on Facebook without getting rejected. There are lots of possibilities.

3) Something that will move your readers emotionally and make them feel good.

This could be anything motivational and positive, success stories that you know, upbeat and uplifting stories about people who achieved success against all odds, things like that. Here you are looking to provide inspiration, hope, and encouragement to your readers.

4) Something that will make them laugh and relax, that they will share with their friends.

This is where your creative side will come forward. You can share anything that is funny or different (it doesn’t always have to be strictly business related). This is the type of content that can go viral and potentially spread your link around in many different places where it wouldn’t otherwise appear.

These four approaches to creating blog and article topics typically work well, consistently. Always think in terms of “what answers and solutions are people in my niche looking for….and how can I provide them”.

Let’s add a fourth “E” – focus on ENLIGHTENING, ENTERTAINING, EDUCATIONAL, and ENCOURAGING. Keeping this in mind will help make any home business blog content you put out there, as well as your articles, more magnetic and appealing to the people you are trying to reach.

Everyone talks about it….but as a home business owner, do you REALLY need a blog to promote your business online?

Blogging is one way to establish your presence on the Internet and show the world who you are and what you do. Google and other search engines love frequently updated content, which is what a well-managed home business blog will consistently provide.

The question is, though, do you HAVE to have a blog to be successful online with your home based business?

Here are the facts:

• you can promote your business online just using social media and sending people to a company replicated sales page

• you can do the same with a small 3-4 page traditional website that has a little information about your offer and an opt-in

So knowing this, why would you need to start a blog? Blogs take more work than traditional websites.

• a blog needs fresh content every week (3-4 new posts if possible)

• a blog need a little maintenance, attention to updates, etc.

• all in all, traditional websites are easier – just publish and forget for the most part

Let’s look at three different ways you can promote your business online, as well as establish trust and credibility for your personal brand.

Using a Company Replicated Site

This is the simplest option – everything is done for you, it is usually a professionally designed presentation designed to sell, and often includes some form of opt-in to help capture leads who want more information.

The downside is that the company owns this site. Even if it is customizable, it is basically the same website everyone else has. What sets you apart? If you depend on it as your “home base” online, what do you have if you choose to move on to a different opportunity sometime in the future?

Using a Static Website

For having your own personalized site that is truly yours, this is the simplest and most low-maintenance option. It can be small, 3-4 pages, with content designed to entice prospects to opt-in for more details. A “static website” is just a traditional site with content that rarely changes. This is in contrast to blogs, which ideally have fresh content posted weekly.

The downside – maintaining a traditional website requires hiring someone, or learning how to use Dreamweaver or one of the free publishing programs like KompoZer, along some knowledge of HTML.

Setting Up a WordPress Blog

To promote your business online, I’m talking about a blog on your own domain, not the free type like they offer at wordpress.com. The software to run your own self-hosted blog is found at wordpress.org.

Disadvantages of a blog include higher maintenance than other options, but look at the advantages!

• you own it and nobody can take it away from you or tell you what you can and cannot do with it

• it is user friendly with a simple interface for publishing content

• you can get just the right look with one of thousands of available themes (I recommend premium themes that you pay for over the free ones)

• they are search engine friendly and with the right plugins you can easily rank in search engines for your content

• free WordPress plugins make it really simple to promote through social media, and do just about anything else you want, easily

Bottom line – use a WordPress blog as your home base and online marketing hub. Use social media and advertising to drive traffic to it. Promote your business online by having an opt-in form in place to build your list and create a community of fans and followers who can be your future customers and business associates!

Check out “The Eldon Beard Show” on the Home Business Radio Network – this week on one of my shows, I will be going into greater detail about whether a blog is really your best option to promote your business online.

Home business marketing – everything you do to promote your home business, both online and offine – can become quite confusing and stressful.

Even if you are working a business model that comes with a simple step-by-step marketing plan, it is human nature to want to explore as many other options as possible. Just about everyone desires to build their business as quickly as they can.

So, let’s say you have a network marketing business. You know that the business is pretty simple – prospecting, presenting, and enrolling those who catch the vision and want to work with you.

Most likely, your opportunity has a basic training routine that teaches you a simple system for finding leads and building up your business. So is that enough?

Think about all the home business marketing techniques you can use to grow your income even faster!

• online advertising

• social media prospecting

• article marketing

• blogging

• press releases

• message boards and forums

Not to mention all the neat tools, e-courses, DVD sets, MLM training programs, and everything else out there that seems to offer great hope for helping you attract hundreds more MLM prospects fairly easily.

Home business marketing can become very overwhelming because of all these options. There are lots of ways to find more prospects, and all of these methods can work.

The problem is, if you take on too much, you can end up scattered and not accomplishing much at all. I am writing this today because I was once in this situation.

I am a student of home business marketing, especially the online aspect of it. I have tried, tested, and adapted many different approaches for attracting visitors to my blogs and websites over time. I’ve found myself becoming overwhelmed and losing ground when I took on too much at once.

So, to avoid confusion and inertia that is a natural result of being overwhelmed, here is what I learned and recommend to you.

1) Master the basic fundamentals of building your business first – it does little good to attract more prospects if you aren’t able to follow up and present your opportunity effectively. It’s easy to avoid the fundamentals and spend time looking for “faster and more efficient” ways to prospect. Beware of this.

2) Once you have the fundamentals down and are sponsoring people and making some money, pick an area where you want to branch out. For example, you might choose to study and master the art of Facebook marketing. Begin getting some leads this way and sponsoring them, then if you have time, choose another technique and repeat.

I emphasize mastering the basic fundamentals of your business first because so many home business owners make a big mistake.

They jump into many different promotional methods, particularly online, and end up not gaining a whole lot from all of it. This is because they never get mastery of the basics that are essential for success in the first place.

Home business marketing doesn’t have to be difficult – just master the basic fundamentals first, then branch out and learn how to do everything you do well before you move to something else.

I recently found some great ideas for promoting your home based business offline.

Even with the outstanding potential for making connections and promoting your products and services online, there are still many advantages to offline promotion.

Some of these ideas will work best for traditional direct selling opportunities, others are excellent for network marketing businesses as well.

I have a lot of these, so I’ll spread them out among 3-4 posts rather than creating one huge article. Pick your favorites and comment below to share you experiences!

1. Take a snack sized sandwich bag and make a little packet that you can hand out to people you run into everywhere – include your business card, opportunity flyer, current specials if that applies, samples if you have them, etc.

2. Make up some flyers with your contact information (phone, email, website) and include details about any specials you’re offering. Contact local apartments, mobile home parks, housing developments, etc. and see if you can leave brochures in their office or distribute them by placing on residents’ doors. Offer the people in the office a gift or discount on products they order from you.

3. Get in touch with bridal supply stores, catering services, formal wear rental centers, etc. See if they will let you leave your business cards & brochures about the wonderful (Your Company’s Name) Bridal Gift Registry that they can give to customers. Offer them a free gift or discounts for helping you out.

4. Look for local daycare centers and leave a few cards, brochures, and perhaps discount offers there. Excellent place to find potential work at home moms.

5. Many churches hold a Spring and Fall Festival! Contact them and see what it costs to get a booth or table. The cost is often very reasonable and you can meet a lot of people. It’s a good idea to do a contest type drawing at these events. You can capture contact information and follow up with them later!

6. Join your local chamber of commerce and get involved! They frequently have events and functions that you can participate in.

7. Do you have a local college or university? Many students are looking for ways to make extra money, and a business they can work around their challenging schedule is very appealing. Most campuses have bulletin boards and other areas where you can post ads and leave brochures.

8. See if you have a local area “Welcome to the Neighborhood” type group. They often hand out packets with local business promotions and even samples. Include yours!

9. Contact the human resources department at local hospitals. Many hand out packets filled with goodies for new moms!

10. Check with local radio stations, they have contests and promotions and are always looking for sponsors and freebies.

11. Do you have a bingo hall in your area? They are always looking for people to donate prizes, and this is a big deal in some areas.

12. Get in touch with your local Chamber of Commerce and inquire about job fairs held in your local area. Rent a booth or table and tell people about your business opportunity.

13. Call local colleges and universities and see when their next job or employment fair is. A booth is often cheap at these events and you can get a lot of prospects this way.

14. Target your local gyms and health clubs! You can get a table for $30 or less in most cases. Make sure you have several products out, plenty of catalogs, business cards and brochures.

15. Find others in your area who are in a home business and network. Find out what events and promotional opportunities they participate in. They can often tell you about strategies and venues that would otherwise be difficult to find.

More to come!

Have you thought about the value of time when it comes to building your network marketing or direct sales home business?

Many in network marketing and direct sales are building an income for their future while working a full-time job as well as managing family and other responsibilities.

Planning and setting aside time for home business activities is important, because in our busy lives it’s quite easy to put things off until later, or wait to take action at a “better time”.

I found this short video last night which puts an interesting perspective on the value of time and how quickly it can slip past us if we’re not careful.

Take a look and see what you think.

It’s not that I didn’t understand the value of time before I watched it, it’s just that this presentation makes it kind of sink in. I immediately thought about my own personal time management and how critical it is to stay on top of our most valuable asset – our time.

Here are some tips I use to help manage my own home business and network marketing activities. How you do it may be different. Please comment below and share with us how you make managing your time easier and more effective.

Here is what I do each week.

1) At the beginning of each week, I make a list (overview) of what I need to accomplish. This can include basic tasks such as “x number of followup calls to prospects” as well as activities like writing blog posts and articles to promote my business.

2) I look at my week ahead and plan the time slots I’ll be using to do these things. That will include morning, afternoon, evening, and weekend time where I will plan to work in my primary business activities around other responsibilities. Most weeks, these time slots are pretty consistent so this step is usually pretty simple.

3) I allocate tasks to the times when I am most effective doing them. For example, I typically blog in the early morning, when it’s quiet and I can have uninterrupted time. I will plan prospect calls mostly in the evening, when people are home from work. Other things fall in between wherever they fit best.

I know this sounds rather simple and basic, and it is! What helps me maximize the value of time here, though, is the PLANNING process I do. At one time, I would carry a list of things I needed to do for my business in my head, and when I could pick up some spare minutes during the week, I’d do something.

Just carrying my list of things I needed to do in my head didn’t work out very well. The reason? Tendency to procrastinate, get interrupted, just about any excuse you can think of. This is why I strongly encourage people I work with to decide what times they want to set aside for their business, and write out an action plan for that time.

I know we’re all busy, and sometime the best plan will have to be changed because “stuff” happens. To maximize the value of time that you do have, though, a plan and focus is essential. What are your thoughts?

Today’s home business tip is about how you present yourself to prospects and potential customers. There is a lot of training and teaching on how to “posture” yourself for success, but there is something here to think about.

Are you being authentic and genuine as you go about promoting your home business to others? Are your potential customers and prospects seeing the “real you”, or someone you are pretending to be? Because building a home based business requires you to interact and work with other people, being yourself is the best advantage you can have over your competition. Too many people try to copy how the home business “superstars” act and talk, and often rather awkwardly at that.

Let’s take network marketers as an example. Network marketing is a people business. The life and growth of your business depends on attracting people who are seeking opportunity, sponsoring them into your business, and working with them as a team.

You want to know the truth? Your prospects out there aren’t as focused on judging you by how much you appear to make or how successful you appear to be. These things might be interesting, for sure, but people are looking to work with people who are sincere, passionate, and real.

It’s important to be yourself and establish your own credibility and authority from the beginning. You may not be making much money yet, nor be an expert on all things MLM, but you do have a lot to offer. If you are excited and committed to your business, right away you have something of value to others – your support and encouragement to new team members who join you.

There is no-one like you. You will attract people to your business that I can’t. I will sign people up that you won’t. The reason is our differences – what makes us unique also enables us to attract others by being ourselves. Being genuine. My approach and style will resonate with some people, and yours will be more appealing to others. But through it all, other people can tell if we are being real, or pretending.

This is especially important if you are using social networking sites like Facebook to make friends and build relationships. Honestly, it’s pretty easy to spot people who are living out the “fake it till you make it” philosophy. On the Internet and in social networking communities, it’s easy enough to pretend you are an expert. You can pretend that you are making lots of money and sponsoring people right and left, but ultimately people can just sense if you aren’t being real.

Just be yourself. Be committed, enthusiastic, and happy about whatever you do, and people will want to work with you! No pretending or faking it necessary. It’s great (and advisable) to work hard to learn the success secrets of the superstars, but the key to making this work is to take those secrets and apply them in YOUR own style and manner.

This is the gist of today’s home business tip – don’t try to copy and be someone you aren’t. Find out what the leaders and stars do, apply good success techniques that you learn, but be yourself and put the best of YOU out there. That’s what makes it all happen.

One of the first things you need to know and understand, to ensure maximum success in your home based business, is WHY you’re building your business. What is motivating you to do this?

It might be a desire for extra income to help with household expenses, money to create a college fund for your kids, or maybe a strong desire to become fully independent and free from your regular job.

Whatever your reason for starting your home business, this is really important. Without a clear vision of WHY you’re building your business, it will be harder to sustain the enthusiasm and consistent effort required to make money and achieve success.

Once you have your WHY clearly in mind, be sure to write it down. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is very important. A lot of people say it, and I know it may be hard to understand why, but something about writing your WHY down helps to make it more clear and meaningful. It should be written down, and kept in a place where you can go back and reflect on it from time to time.

Here are a few things to help you along as you define your WHY, along with actions you need to plan. Take some time with this in the beginning and make sure you have an emotional connection to it. It must really mean a lot to you in order to be a real motivator to action.

Write down your WHY (full time income, financial independence, whatever it is for you). Once you have that, drill down and make it very focused and meaningful. Get down to where the emotion is. Is your desire to provide a better home for your family? To stay home with your children? To help others in need? To pursue a special interest or passion that you’ve always dreamed of?

Whatever it is, make sure the final result is something you feel strongly about. Something that means a LOT to you. Something that drives you and helps you spring out of bed in the morning looking forward to the day.

Once you have your WHY well defined, put a date on it. Set a general timetable for achieving it. This can be, realistically, 3-5 years of sustained and focused effort. Maybe less, depending on your circumstances and special skills.

Next, identify any obstacles that might slow you down or hinder your progress. Be prepared for them and be ready to blow past them. Anticipate some of these obstacles and be prepared, mentally, to kick them aside if you encounter them.

Create a plan of action that will realistically get you where you want to be (if you are in network marketing, your upline team should help with this).

Be a willing student – and apply what you learn. You will have training available, and help from upline mentors who are already where you want to be – listen and learn from them.

Getting your WHY down first, then formulating a realistic action plan, then working your plan consistently – this is the key to success.

There is a lot of coaching and training out there that teaches basic principles of how to achieve home business success. This type of teaching is generic, and applies to whatever type of home business you choose.

It’s interesting to study how different authors and speakers get their point across, because one might convey a thought or principle in a way that has great impact when you hear it, while another may make essentially the same point but it just doesn’t resonate with you.

There are five principles for home business success that are pretty common in all the teaching and training that I’ve seen. I believe that getting these five in line sets the stage and lays the foundation for your future prosperity.

Carefully Define Your Goals

This goes without saying – if you don’t have a  strong “why”, along with written goals that clearly define your business objective, it will be all that much harder to achieve home business success. I’m not talking about vague desires, like “I want to make a lot of money“, but rather very specific statements of what you’re shooting for. By the end of May, 2012, I want to be earning a net income of $5000 per month with my home business.

Create Your Action Plan

We’ve all seen people who seem to just go out and start “doing stuff”, and somehow manage to make money from home. There are those rare gifted individuals who seem to fly by the seat of their pants and make it. The reality is, though, that they had a plan even if it was only in their head. Most of us need more organization than that, so a clear action plan, a road map of how you’re going to achieve your home business goals, is a must.

Be Diligent and Enforce Priorities

Life is very busy and there are always reasons and excuses to get sidetracked away from the essential actions required for your home business success. If you don’t establish your priorities and stick to them, it will be very easy to procrastinate and do things that aren’t productive. Things that won’t make money for you. Set priorities for your action plan and stick to them.

Hang Out With Positive and Successful People

If you can, join a “mastermind” group of like-minded entrepreneurs. This is a fantastic way to keep yourself charged with fresh enthusiasm and ideas. Just being around, and associating with, motivated and driven home business entrepreneurs can have a very positive effect on your business. Enthusiasm is contagious!

Eliminate Unnecessary Negative Influence

Finally, try to avoid associating with people who are negative or critical. Some people go so far as to suggest you drop your friends who are like this. I don’t encourage dumping a friend – you can always hope your great attitude will rub off on them someday (hopefully!), but I do suggest not hanging out regularly with people who are negative and drag you down. There has to be balance here, just do the best you can.

Home business success is a combination of many things, but these five tips can help you set a solid foundation for making it happen.

Paper clutter is one of those things that plagues many people who work from home. I’m one of those people who tends to have a lot of paper around that I don’t really need anymore, and it just takes up valuable space and becomes a mess over time.

Have you been there, done that? Has the top of your desk or workspace ever been covered with miscellaneous stacks and piles of paper in random fashion? Have you opened drawers only to find unnecessary paper stuffed in there that you have to dig through to find something?

I’ve taken steps to eliminate this problem, and I’d like to share some tips that have helped me overcome my paper clutter problem.

Your home office can be a large room in your house, or maybe even just a corner in your bedroom. Wherever you are, you will have paperwork there to deal with. Depending on what type of business you are running, it can be a little or a lot of paper. What’s true, in either case, is that paper which isn’t well managed will turn into paper clutter no matter how little you have.

I read once that paper clutter is the result of delaying decisions. I would have to agree with that, because I’m one who has that tendency to read something and then put it in a stack to deal with some other time. It’s so easy to think “I’ll get to this later” so you leave it laying around thinking “out of sight, out of mind so I’d better keep it here where I’ll remember“. This is the beginning of the problem.

Take a glance around your home office space. What paper do you see? Do you know why all of it is there? Many times we’ll print out information for reference, and just leave it laying around. A great deal of the paper is simply accumulating to create undesirable clutter, and needs to be processed in one of two ways:

• file it where that you will remember to look for it when you need it, IF you will really need it later

• toss it in the trash if it’s something you don’t really need or just want to save for no special reason

If a piece of paper can be filed away pretty fast, just do it while you have your hands on it. If it represents a reminder to do something you can go ahead and get done, do it and toss the paper. You’ll feel much better for getting the task out of the way and ridding your workspace of one more unnecessary piece of paper clutter.

If the paper is a reminder, or something you need for a task you can only do later, create some sort of “pending” folder where it can stay out of the way until you need it. Set up a reminder in your calendar or scheduler for the date you need to pull it out and act on it.

The real key to getting rid of paper clutter is dealing with it while it’s in your hands. File it or toss it. Avoid procrastinating and putting it in piles to deal with later. This takes a lot of discipline, but it has helped me tremendously.