To be successful in your business you need some good work from home tools. Your own creativity and focus is essential but without the right tools you will find it hard to succeed.
Many tools will cost you some money, but many times you can get some free advice directly from the companies that sell work from home tools. A well known example is Mike Dillards products like the “Magnetic Sponsoring” and his other useful tools. You can find a list of them in my blog following the link below. But there are also free methods that could be treated as “tools” too, and the first I’d like to talk about is e-mail.
Building your e-mail list is a matter of it’s own and I will not cover that in this article. E-mail can be sent as plain text messages or HTML coded. Many list building sites use plain text only, so most of the marketing messages you receive is in plain text format. The first obstacle you have to overcome with your message is to get the person to actually open and read it. That’s why the subject line is so important. And to be able to write a good subject line you have to be really clear of your own intentions with your message. Do you want them to buy a product, clink a link or anything else? But let’s say that you have a business offer and you have a squeeze page you want them to enter. Your subject line has to be something catchy but without telling exactly what you offer.
An example could be: Do You Want To Make A Change in 2010? Not telling anything but it’s still tempting.
So you got them interested enough to open the message! Next step should be to begin your message body by telling how you can help solving their problem. And your solution could still be a bit “hidden” if you really want them to click on your link. But still it’s really important to establish trust and a personal relationship while keeping it as short as possible. Keep relevant and skip all unnecessary information. I have this great solution for you and it’s really simple… A great way to increase the number of people clicking your link, is to offer something for free. (Report, e-book, video). And to really tighten your offer, there could be a time line for it. Make a clear ending and remember to be honest and show a personal contact link and your name. So to make sure your e-mail can be a good work from home tool in your marketing, read it through several times before posting. Try to put yourself in the readers situation. Is the subject line tempting? You will only get a couple of seconds of attention, so your e-mail has to be easy to read and very clear.
Twitter is a social media that has caught a lot of attention during the last year. Many people does not realize how Twitter can be used as a marketing tool, but the truth is that it’s one of the most effective free tools out there. You might not become a millionaire on Twitter only, but all skills you learn, can be transferred to other social medias.
Setting up your Twitter account is a straightforward task and should not cause any problems, but you should follow these simple guidelines:
- Your account name! Preferably you should select your own name as your user name. If that’s not available, use your middle initials or something else combined with your name. You should brand yourself. Your business will show later.
- Pick a great picture of yourself. Leaving this part out will absolutely lower your chances. Worst case is all users that are just using a Twitter default picture. I for sure would not follow that person. Find a picture that sends out positive and trustful signals.
- Use the 160 characters for your bio to give a positive view of yourself. Be honest, but don’t be shy. Short statements of you as person mixed with some words of what your mission is.
- Get a nice background picture. There are many sites with free images, so just select one that you like and that sends out positive energy from your site. Twitterimage.com is just one site to mention.
- If you have some photoshop (or similar) skills, you might want to add some extra information to your picture, but it’s not that necessary in the beginning.
So, now you’re up and running! Next step is to build your follower list. There are two different lists in Twitter, followers, and follows. Followers are those reading your tweets. Your goal is to get as many followers as possible to have a chance of getting leads for your business. The easiest way to get followers, is simply to follow the right persons, and they will (often) follow you back. To select the right categories of users, simply click “Find People” and enter a name like “Mike Dillard”, category like “online business” or a any other subject and click follow on those you’d like to see as followers. Repeat this task every day to increase your list. Remember that Twitter only allows a 10{ad5bb9fecb583deb4f0824f2220347f82cf22be85faf385196d32747341ff3d9} follows/follower ratio, so now and then you have to unfollow persons who are not following you.
Last but not least, in order to become successful on Twitter, you have to be an active “Tweeter” yourself. Send 10-15 tweets per day and use a mix of personal statements, quotes, jokes, value added links and of course your own advertising tweets. Do NOT just send your ads over and over again. Make connections, BE SOCIAL, and you will soon see that you will start getting your leads from Twitter!
