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!

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.

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!

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.

However producing a report and then selling it at $7, does 2 things for your business.

1.  It builds you a list of customers instead of just prospects.  Those people who are interested enough about what you are selling to pay for that information, instead of freebie seekers who may never buy from you.

2.  It puts money in your pocket!  Let’s face it, seeing payments rolling into your Paypal account is a great feeling and it makes all the hard work we put in worth it!

It may take longer to build your list this way but you can always use a variety of methods to build your list, both free and paid.

Most 7 dollar reports will come with the information you need to get the script so that you can start doing your own $7 reports.  If you want to get started straight away you can get your $7 script here.

The way the script works is that you sell your product through Paypal on your website and behind the scenes you can add a one time offer (OTO) and also offer affiliates the chance to earn 100% affiliate income for promoting your report(s).  You also have the opportunity to offer your affiliates a percentage of your OTO as well.  The script does everything that you need and all for $7!  It can be installed pretty easily – it comes with a detailed instruction manual and if you get stuck there is a support forum where you can go for help.

Once you’ve created your first $7 report and start selling it, you will get hooked on creating even more.  Remember to capture the email addresses of those who buy your reports so that you can keep in touch with them and send out even more valuable information and your next $7 report!

Many people when they do start their home based business they get caught up in the online hype about the next best thing, instead of finding a niche that they feel passionate about and making a business out of that.  Do you have a skill that you can teach others to do?  Do you have a hobby that you can build a website around?  The beauty of the internet is that while you may be the only person in your local area who is passionate about a particular thing, when you get online you can find hundreds, if not thousands of like-minded people, pretty quickly.

It is very easy, with social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Ning communities and Twitter to find hobby and business groups to join.  You can start answering any questions on these forums and become known as an expert in your chosen field pretty quickly.

Need a website?  You can create your own website for just a few dollars startup costs on buying a domain and some hosting and using WordPress to build your website.

Never has it been so cheap nor so easy to start a home based business.  The commute time is amazing and if you have children, there is no more childcare costs to pay until your business really starts to take off, and that’s only if you want to have childcare.

As for creating content and products, you can use free software such as OpenOffice to create your products and use free social media websites to promote both your website and your products.  You can get a product creation guide to help you figure out how to use free software to create your paid products.

Before starting your business you will need to check with your local authority/local government office to register as a home business.  There are usually very friendly staff there who will talk you through the process.

Having visitors sign up to your rss feeds is great but you should always have an alternative, one that you have more control over and that’s where the mailing list opt-in box comes in.  There are several email marketing software companies that you can use to start your mailing list.

There are 3 main autoresponder companies to choose from, each offer either a free trial of their service or a free version, which comes with advertising on each email you send out as well as a limited service (usually just 1 autoresponder per account). This is fine if you are just starting out, however if you are already established, you should have your autoresponder already and this delivery system won’t cost you any extra!

I use GetResponse as my autoresponder, which I’m very happy with and it works out cheaper than Aweber which quite a few of my clients use and Aweber also offer a $1 first month trial. To compare the 2, GetResponse is the cheaper option although the less well known brand (although it’s catching up!) and most of the emails you will receive from internet marketers will be from Aweber, apart from mine!

Another option is Constant Contact which offers a 60 day free trial. This is another great way to get started, without the initial expense.

Have a look at all 3 and choose which one best suits your needs for now and for the immediate future.  Once you’ve signed up and set  up your mailing list, you will be given a code to use to capture email addresses.  This is the code you need to use for the next step.

It is very simple to add an opt-in box to your WordPress blog within the sidebar as a widget.  Go to Appearance – Widgets – and you will see your widget options.  You want to place the code into a TEXT widget, and in the main sidebar, which is usually the right one.  Press save and then you should see your opt-in box appear on your website.

There are a few main social bookmarking sites that you’ve probably heard about – Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious and Diigo that are very popular with users, and you can follow others bookmark accounts to see what they have been bookmarking.

When using social bookmarking it’s a good idea not to just bookmark your own websites all the time as the search engines might get wise to what you are doing, it’s better to have a mix of sites you’ve bookmarked.

Also it is good to know that often when you get traffic from bookmarked websites it can often be quick traffic, in that they have come to your website out of curiousity and unless you make an instant good impression, they will leave quickly.  So if you are getting lots of traffic but no conversions then you should think about editing your content to be more appealing to visitors, that is unless you are getting conversions on your page from other traffic.

As you can see at the bottom of this blog post, I have many different social bookmarks available for you to use to bookmark this post.  The plugin I used is called Sexy Bookmarks, and if you like this plugin, you can add it to your WordPress blog too, very easily.

All you need to do is go to Plugins – Add New – and in the search bar, search for “sexy bookmarks” and when it appears in your list, click on “install”.

Once you have installed Sexy Bookmarks you will now be using social media to promote your website.  Make sure you have Google Analytics installed on your website so that you can then track how effective this is for your site.

With all the different rss readers available, it’s much easier for a visitor to subscribe to your rss feed rather than to sign up to your mailing list.  One of the main reasons is that the visitor is then under control over what they read and will not get their email address misused and sold or rented to a third party and receive spam in their email inbox.

Google, Yahoo and MSN all have their own readers, which means if you have an account with any of these services, you can add your blog feed to these readers as another way for the search engines to pick up and index your content, especially if you make the reader feed public.

Also there is bloglines which is a very popular blog reader, where you can keep all the feeds of the blogs you follow in one place.

There are also hundreds of blog directories that you can submit your blog rss feed to.  You can just go to your chosen search engine and search for “blog directory rss submission”.

Ning is a community of different groups, and with each profile you create in the different groups you can add an rss feed which is a great opportunity to add your own blog feed.  Only join the groups that relate to your market as these members will be most interested in your content.  Remember that if a Ning group is private, in that you need to join it before you can see any of the content, then the search engines will not be able to index your feed.

I’m sure everyone reading this will have a Facebook group.  You can also add your blog feed to Facebook Notes and have your blog content flowing into your Facebook account too.

These are just a few of the ways you can use your rss feed to promote your blog.  What other ways do you know of?

You may be forgiven for thinking that if you have a mainly international business that being listed locally isn’t really what you want to be doing.  However, if you are listed on even page 10 of Google for your main keyword, chances are you won’t be getting much traffic, if any.  Now by making sure that your website is listed in Google’s local listings, you can jump up a few pages and even land on page 1 for any local searches relating to your website.

This is a HUGE benefit for any business and the fact that it’s a free resource provided by Google, every business owner who has a website should get listed.  Also, by checking out who else is listed on here, you can find out who your local competitors are and if you want to get more involved in your local business community, you can easily check them out.

How do you get listed?  I’ve compiled a step by step guide that you get here:  Google Local Business Results