Systems are worth their weight in gold.  Creating your own home business system will pay dividends for years to come if you set it up correctly.  I’m not just talking about automation, but the way you create your system for growth and improvement.

So what makes a good home business system?

Having a home business can be a great thing, with so many advantages, however if you don’t set  up a system of working efficiently as well as one which maximises your income, you could be headed for failure instead of success.

A system is like having a plan or written down goals, where you are always striving to improve it.  It helps you work more efficiently and effectively and for me, it helps me overcome procrastination.

If you’ve ever read The E-Myth by Michael Gerber then you will have an idea of what a system is.  Although Gerber advises creating a system (aka a business) that will work without you in it, pretty much like Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek you need to start somewhere and often when starting your own home business system, money, time and childcare can limit the speed of your progress.

You need to start with a plan or goal for your system.   Afterall you cant create a system if you aren’t sure what that system is supposed to achieve.  Here you can start with a small system or several small systems that feed into your main home business system like cogs in a wheel.  Often it’s easier to start with a small cog, and get that system working efficiently to have a better perspective on how the whole system works.  Making sure of course that each small cog is in alignment with your main objective.

For example, if your main system is to create $10k/month passive income and the first system you want to work on is getting clients to work with, one on one, then this goes against your overall objective.  This doesn’t mean that you can’t take on clients like that, especially if you need the money, but remember that your ultimate goal for your system is to earn $10k/month passive income.  Therefore this shouldn’t be part of your system for perfecting, eventually working on your system consistently, will mean that you can eventually phase out taking on clients because the system that you’ve set up will be working and achieving your initial goal.

Once you have your ultimate goal for your main system, you can start to create the inner systems that will help you achieve your main goal.  You will often find that once you have perfected one of the smaller systems, that you can then take that knowledge and system and “rinse and repeat” it with your other systems.

Taking the $10k/month example, you may decide that part of this involves creating a niche website, promoting affiliate products.  As you work on perfecting this system, you will see your passive income increasing and you may well decide to take this system and replicate it on many more websites, or you may decide to branch out into Squidoo or other web 2.0 websites and do the same there.  The basic system will be the same but there will be different actions you will need to take to perfect it for a different platform.

Eventually, as your home business system starts achieving it’s main goal and you have the money to reinvest into your system, you can outsource many of the tasks, knowing that by investing $x in outsourcing your return will be $x+y, making a nice profit and return on the time you spent creating your system, which will be bringing you in a passive income for many years to come.

Make sure you sign up for Website Secrets Report on this site, which will help you get your website set up correctly and best of all its FREE!

I’ve come across quite a few people recently who have mistakenly believed that because they have submitted their website sitemap to Google, that all their pages will automatically be indexed.  They waste hours searching for the keywords they have used on their pages and blog posts to see which page they will appear on in Google, then end up frustrated because they can’t find their page.

Unfortunately just because you submit your sitemap to Google, it doesn’t mean that Google will automatically index your pages.  There is even more bad news!  When you create articles and submit them to article directories, expecting a backlink to be automatically created once your article is approved, some of these articles won’t be indexed either.

There is no point spending time and/or money on creating backlinks to your website or creating content for your website if they are not getting indexed by Google.

Even if your website is the most highly search engine optimized page ever created for your keyword, if it’s not indexed then you won’t receive even ONE visitor to your website.

So how do you know which pages are indexed and which are not?  Well in Google Webmaster Tools, you get to see the number of pages that are contained in your sitemap and how many are actually indexed, but it doesn’t tell you what pages these are.  Not only that, there is no way to tell which of your promotional content that you’ve created for article directories and other web 2.0 sites have been indexed either.

There is a solution!

My friend Andy Black has created a fantastic little application to tell you in a few clicks which pages on your website still need indexed, as well as the status of your articles on Ezine Articles and GoArticles, to name just 2, as well as your Squidoo lenses and Hubpages,as well as other web 2.0 sites.  It is so simple to use and he is selling it for only $7!

I’ve been using it for a while now and it has really helped me focus my attention on getting pages indexed, as well as finding out which sites are better for indexing in Google quickly and which ones need a little nudge!

When you download Index Checker, you’ll get an instruction manual that I’ve created as I think everyone who has an online business needs this great tool.

First of all what is Google Alerts?  Google Alerts is another great service from Google where you can check out what other people are saying about a variety of things.  You can set up alerts for keywords, brands, your name, your local area, infact anything you can think about.  Once you’ve set up your keyword or keyword phrase, Google will then email you with all the information you’ve requested, without you having to go searching for it.  It can be hugely useful for a number of different things, and I’m sure you’ll be able to think of even more uses for it.

When setting up your Google Alerts you can choose where Google searches for the information.  You can choose news, blogs, web, video, groups or comprehensive (a mix of all the other methods).  If you are a blogger and you want to find blogs to comment on and be seen as an expert in your field, then you can search through the blogs and see who is also blogging about your topic.  Perhaps you want to keep on track of the latest Google group activity and to see which groups are discussing your topic, you can just set it up in your Google Alerts and let the information flow through to you.

You also have a choice about how often the information is emailed to you.  If you are just starting out and you want to keep an eye out on what people are saying about you or your business then you can set up a daily email, or for less urgent information, weekly emails.  If, however, you are needing up to date information, as quickly as possible for some reason, then there is the option to be emailed as often as it happens.  Just watch your email inbox with this as it may get very full, very quickly!

One way to stop your inbox being inundated with emails, is to set up your settings for your alerts to flow into a feed that you can read on Google Reader instead.  Then if you have your iGoogle page set up as your home page, you can then keep a close eye on the alerts that are coming through.

Although when starting out you may be unsure about why you would want to use Google Alerts, but it’s good to get into the habit of receiving alerts on your field of expertise so you can keep up to date with everything.  Perhaps you are focusing on a new niche and you want to find out more about it and what the competition is like in that field.  You can even set up alerts with the keyword being your competition to see what they are up to online.  Remember your competitors can easily do the same to you!

It’s interesting what can turn up in your Google alerts so start testing them today!

Time is short.  Time is valuable.  Learning to work smarter online instead of harder is a must and learning how to automate updating your statuses with new blog posts is one of these smart things to do!

One of the best ways that I find to maximise my productivity is to use a WordPress plugin called Shorten2Ping.  It allows you to link your Ping.fm account with a url shortening service which means each time you create a blog post and publish it, all the social profiles that you’ve set up will get their status update with details about your blog post.

Setting up your blog this way will save  you hours of time going through and updating each status individually and you can go back at a more convenient time and pick up any comments that your blog post has received.

If you have Google Analytics installed on your website, you can then see at a glance, which of the social profiles is actually driving the most traffic to your website thanks to your blog post.  You can then use this information to  your advantage and instead of wondering which social network to spend your time on and maximise the value of your time, you will know which is bringing in the most traffic, as well as which is converting the best.

Many of you may not have heard about Ping.fm or Bit.ly or Su.pr, so I’ve created a step by step report on how you can set up the accounts you need and install the Shorten2Ping plugin so that you too can automate and make better use of your time.

What do you need to do to get your hands on this report?  Just tweet this blog post to your Twitter followers and be taken directly to download your report.  No signups required!  If you get value in this report, you can get lots more by signing up to our mailing list on the right.