Eventually, he quit and started a consulting business. He still worked 60-80 hour weeks, coming home so exhausted some nights that he goes to sleep fully clothed.

But not once did he complain about how much he hated his work.  Sure the long hours and overwhelming demands were still there, but Boris looked forward to going to work each day.

Why?

“I was finally doing what I loved,” he said. “It made the hours all worthwhile.”

Boris’ story mirrors a study by Srully Blotnick.  The study tracked the careers of 1,500 business school graduates from 1960 to 1980. The graduates were grouped into two categories. The 1,245 people in Category A were focused on making money first so they could do what they wanted later. Those in category B, all 255 of them, pursued their interests first, sure that the money eventually would follow. After 20 years, there were 101 millionaires in the group. Only one came from category A, 100 from category B.

Keep this in mind when deciding what business to start. Following the trends and anticipating what consumers want are all good strategies, but first you must love what you do.

If you don’t, you will lack the commitment and dedication needed to make the business succeed, possibly dooming it to failure.

The advantage to doing what you love is that you are already an expert in the field.  Successful entrepreneurs usually have a deep knowledge of their niche, they know the history, the early players and they can usually pick a need in the market that has previously gone unfulfilled. This need can be something as simple as finding an inexpensive version of an existing product, or in Boris’s case, reaching out to people in low income neighborhoods, who had previously been ignored.

It’s also going to take all your heart promoting, refining and getting people to fall in love with your product. If your heart is not in it, how can you convince others to believe your product or service is worthwhile? It’s for this reason you can’t easily switch from say hunting to writing just because you think there is a market for writing.

Work at home mom, Michelle Schill had a passion for hair styling and with the help of SiteSell.com launched a website that helped her to bring her passion to the world. Her story was recently featured on the company’s website, and her advice is simple – find your passion and pursue it.

It’s the first step to any successful business. If you love what you do, coping with problems, dealing with vendors, frustrated customers, working 12 hours each day, will just be part of the process. In fact, like Boris, every thing you do will just be a delight – part of a new fun-filled adventure.

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Fortunately, there are a lot of tools available, such as Dreamweaver and Site Build It that can help any beginner build and market a website. However, before doing anything you will need to answer questions such as:

• Why do you want a website?
• Will it be to sell products and attract new customers or will it just be a brochure for your company?
• Will the website publish a newsletter?
• How much are you prepared to pay to build and maintain the site, and will it be something you do yourself or outsource?

These questions are important because they help you to determine the purpose of your website and a site must have a purpose, otherwise it can do your business more harm than good.

Once you have a good understanding of your website’s purpose, you are going to need to decide where you will host the site and its domain name. When choosing a web hosting company, don’t go for the cheapest or the one with the most features. Go for what you need at the time, and always go for a provider that will allow you to upgrade your package seamlessly. Most providers bundle basic web hosting with a variety of web services like email, newsletters, databases and combine them into packages or hosting plans.

Choose your domain name very carefully. It’s your company’s identity on the web so make it relevant to your company, product, or project. Keep the name short and simple, and if possible keep to about five characters. Also include keywords; keywords are what people enter when searching the net. The Internet is global so choose a name that has positive connotations in all languages.

As a business, it’s best to have your own domain name, which you will have to pay for. Most ISP connection packages along with web hosting space, offer free personal websites. The problem is, your domain name shares their name. For example, you have probably seen websites with an address like, mysite.yahoo.com . This kind of domain name is common for personal or hobby sites, but not ideal for a business.

The credibility that having your own domain name, such as mysite.com, brings to your site is worth the extra cost.

Now you have your domain name and where your site will be hosted. The next step is designing and building the site. A complicated, hard to navigate design will only turn visitors away. Here is where the less is more concept works well.

Watch your choice of background colors. Make sure your background/text color combination is readable. You don’t want readers to squint to see the words on the page, and use black text, or very dark colored text on a white or very light colored background. Save the white on black backgrounds for pages that don’t have a lot of text on them.

Another thing to consider is setting the tone of your website by using mood colors.

It’s believed that certain colors invoke a certain mood so take advantage of that. For example, green is usually referred to as a “concentration” color. You can use color to make your visitors feel energized, relaxed and focused. Here again remember, simplicity is the best.

Ok, now your website is designed and up, it’s time to start promoting it. This is where answering the questions about the purpose of your website comes in handy.

If the purpose of your website is to serve as a brochure, then your best bet is to advertise offline and just refer your clients to the website for more details instead of sending them a brochure

However, if the purpose of the website is to bring in new clients and sell more products, then you need to actively promote your website. At the very least, submit your website to the three major search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN. These are free.

Other promotional options include banner advertising, feeder sites – using other sites that you own and link them to your website – and RSS feeds — “Really Simple Syndication.” It is a new way for content publishers to distribute content.

The idea behind promoting your website is to monetize, which means using the site to make money.

Contextual advertising, such as Yahoo! Publisher Network is by far the easiest way to monetize a website. It’s because you just need to paste code provided by Yahoo! into your web page.

Contextual advertising, not only generates revenue, but provides valuable resources for the website visitor, as the adverts are target adverts that relate to the web page content.

Another option is affiliate programs. It can be very lucrative, but they are not the easiest method to use for beginners. Affiliate programs are an arrangement in which a company pays you a percentage of the sale for every online customer they get through a link from your website to theirs.

With all these tools set up and working, you just need to maintain and monitor your site from now on.

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Now, each year, millions of people make their living by applying this concept called affiliate marketing. Think of it as the modern version of a finder’s fee, where people who introduce a new client to a business are compensated. But in this case, online merchants work out a deal with publishers of independent websites to promote their product and in return, the publisher gets paid for each person that goes to the merchant site and makes a purchase or fills out a form. It’s been touted as “a low-risk, high-reward environment for both parties” and represents the the best online home business opportunity for most people.

In Affiliate Millions, Anthony Borelli and Greg Holden introduce readers to this concept and show them how to join an affiliate network and make it work for them.

Merchants like affiliate marketing because they don’t incur an expense unless results are realized. This model is called pay for performance, and business like Amazon.com have succeeded because of it.

Affiliate marketers like what they are doing also because, it’s a way to earn lots of money and they don’t even need a product. All they need to do is find a product that they like to promote, get some promotional links, and start getting traffic to affiliate links.

MyNetMarketingland.com says “nothing is easier than starting affiliate marketing,” and that it can be done in less than five minutes. You just need the following ingredients:

• Determination, Motivation and 2 Hours a day.
• Website (or Blog) : Free, to less than $300
• Domain Name : Less than $10 / year
• Web Hosting : Less than $10 / month
• Autoresponders : Free, to less than $20/month

If you decide affiliate marketing is something you would like to do, start by choosing a topic you know about. It makes it easier for you to build a site and draw people in if it’s a subject you know about and are interested in. Think of how challenging it would be if you tried to sell something you know nothing about.

Use multiple merchants in the same niche. Use your knowledge to promote three to four merchants on the same site and it gives your visitors a variety of destinations to choose from.

Consider an affiliate network, but remember there is no best network. Just make sure that whatever network you join, it has the merchants you want to work with. You may also want to try a merchant from all the main networks, see what works for you, and then focus your time accordingly.

In an overcrowded market, small niche products, although they don’t get a lot of traffic, might still be a good option because they are less crowded and it’s easier to make a quick sale.

Finally, don’t make the mistake of thinking that this will be easy work. Not only are you going to have to constantly update your site, you will need to keep educating yourself, doing market research, reading stats , and the pay-offs aren’t instant. It can take a few months before you’re even making enough to cover your costs. Many affiliate marketers struggle to get their first commissions, and a majority give up before making any sales.

This is a field that takes perseverance and dedication. Hold onto those two qualities and you will succeed.

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Yahoo! Publisher Network is an advertising program by Yahoo! where website publishers allow Yahoo! to place ads on their sites. Each time these ads are clicked on by visitors, the web publishers earn a share of the revenue that Yahoo! makes from charging that particular advertiser.

Basically it sets up your site to operate like a magazine or newspaper would. You have content/articles mixed in with ads.  Only instead of an advertising department generating the ads for you, Yahoo! provides the ads and share part of the profits with you. The ads would also correlate with the specific keywords or subject matter of the site.

A lot of web publishers use it because it’s free and easy to join. All you have to do is paste a code into your pages, and as mentioned earlier, you don’t have to find the advertisers, so you are free to concentrate on providing the content. It’s suitable for beginners or marketing veterans, and it provides simple easy to understand stats.

However, the challenge for the web publisher will be getting people to the site, which goes back to using the right keywords, finding a niche market and improving your search engine optimization, web building, web linking and copywriting skills. Yahoo! Publisher Network just makes it easy to make money once you start attracting readers.

For these reasons, first concentrate on your website’s content and design. Sites accepted into the Yahoo! program are usually easily navigable, have an adequate quantity of text based content. It suggested that you have your website up for a few months before signing. In that time work on building up your web traffic and readership, which takes patience and hard work.

Ways to attract more traffic include:

• Linking to other sites and blogs. Usually these sites will link back to you, hence drawing more traffic your way. More traffic means a monetizing website, thanks to Yahoo!.
• Optimizing your site for search engines.  Making it so search engines put your website in the first two pages of results is a surefire way to get more visitors to your website, and that’s more people who would click on those Yahoo! ads.
• Add a signature with your website to your outgoing email. It’s a simple and effective marketing tool.
• Start a newsletter; put an option on your website where readers can subscribe to the newsletter.  The good thing with newsletters is that they are frequently forwarded from one person to another, drawing more traffic to your site.

When you finally have a good number of people visiting your webpage and you are ready to participate in Yahoo! Publisher Network, take a moment to read their policy. There some obvious stuff such as forbidding sites containing profanity, pornographic, illicit drug use and other vices, but it also warns against invalid clicks, such as clicking on your ads, using robots or automated clicker.  These are reasons to get banned from the program.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about making sure your site is listed on the top of the search engine’s results. Search engines are compiled of databases put together by computer programs called spiders. These spiders crawl all over the web, going from site to site, indexing each site they visit.

Some search engines list the results of a user search according to link popularity – which site has the most links from other sites. Others organize data according to information contained in the sites meta tag, while others base their results on common themes. Usually a site will use a combination of these and other methods to sort the results, so it’s to your benefit to also use a combination of factors. Just a word of caution about overusing anyone of these methods, it will only work against you.

Link popularity is like a kid in school. The more people who hang around you the more popular you are. In this case the more other sites link to your site, the more popular you are and the higher your rankings on search engines.

Like in school, you can improve your popularity by developing a campaign asking other kids to be your friends/ other websites to link to you. Unfortunately, if you remember from your school days, this is not always successful; it’s the same on the World Wide Web. Link popularity campaigns can be time-consuming and complicated if you don’t have a clear plan of action.

Try instead to make “friends” with those sites that are relevant to your web site. Think of it as making friends with people that like the same things you do. Do a search and look at what the search engines rank as experts in that field. Contact the owners of these sites and ask to link to them and maybe in return they will link to you. Also check out your competitor site and see who links to them.

For those who aren’t familiar with HTML this may just be gibberish, but it has a name. It’s called a Meta Tag, and having it in your HTML coding helps search engines immediately get an idea of what your site is about, and incorporate the tags in their algorithms. Some search engines also list a summary on their results pages, so readers can see what the site is about and what keywords apply to it. For this reason choose your words carefully, make sure it’s something that will entice the reader to read more.

When describing the site in a meta tag, place the keywords at the beginning of your description and close to each other to achieve the best possible ranking, and try limiting the number of characters you use between 150 and 250. Limit the number of keywords you repeat in a meta description to three to seven times. Anything over that could be viewed as spam by the search engines, and the site will be banned from most of the major search engines.

Finally there are themes, which are actually important keywords used consistently throughout the site. These keywords can be placed in Meta Tags, the website’s title or in the body. Search engines look for these keywords to get information about the site’s themes, which also plays a part in the ranking process.

As with meta tags, avoid spamming. The general suggestion is to repeat keywords in the title or meta tag three to seven times, and in the body, keywords should make up three to seven percent of all the words in text.

For those who would like more information on SEO and how to make it work for them Search Engine Optimization for Dummies can serve as a good starting point.

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Not true.

To really be successful on the web, a small business owner is going to have to go out there and promote his/her website both online and offline. Fortunately, they are a number of popular marketing tools that make it easy to increase traffic. A lot of theses strategies are discussed in Justin Michie’s Street Smart Internet Marketing.

One of the best things you can do for yourself is to make sure your website has content.  Many businesses use the web as a billboard ad, which in the end can be annoying and a waste of time to visitors.  You need specific information to generate traffic. For example, if your website is about a pizza place, then list the company’s menu, background information about the owner, and directions to the store.  This is the sort of information visitors will find useful.

There are also a number of simple and inexpensive things you can do to make your website rank high on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Basically, you want to give the search engines an abundance of clues about your webpage, so it easily pops up in a search.

1. First write a descriptive title for each page of 5 to 8 words, and remove any filler words such as “the” and “and” if possible. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found, and the more people see that which interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link. Also make sure that the title is in the text of your website, not just within a graphics file.
2. The same text rule applies for keywords which is the second way to give search engines clues. Write a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using main keywords and key phrases. Also make sure to use keywords in the first paragraph of the body text because search engines look for and expect this, and make sure these keywords are hyperlinked. Hyperlinks in the body text is usually viewed as being important and is emphasized by the search engine. Finally, develop several webpages on your site, each of them focused on a different keyword or key phrase. These pages will rank higher for their keywords since they contain targeted rather than general content.

Once you’ve done all this, don’t forget to submit your URL to search engines that automatically index the web such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL Search, and Ask.com.

Other ways to use the web to market your website is by linking to key directories using online discussion groups that you are actively a part of. Look for other sites with the same key interest or in the same industries and ask the webmaster that specific page(s) of theirs be linked.

By participating regularly in online groups, you will help to build a reputation for your website as a valuable resource. As a word of caution, don’t just use the board to make announcements about your website, be a member of the community. It will only benefit you in the long run.

Also don’t underestimate the power of your email, so establish a signature. Most e-mail programs such as AOL, Netscape, and Outlook allow you to designate a “signature” at the end of every mail you send out. Limit this signature to company name, address, phone number, URL, e-mail address, and a one-phrase description about the company.

This same principle works offline. Make sure to list your website on all literature and publications — business cards, letter head, newsletters, fax cover sheets. Even add the website address to the company’s voicemail message.

Basically, use any way you can to get your website address out, blogging, podcast, taking out ads in your local newspaper. It will all work with some patience and persistence.

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A self-employed designation is determined by the IRS.  For tax purposes, anyone who is the sole owner of their trade or business, an independent contractor (this includes freelancers), or a member of a partnership in a small business are classified as self-employed.  As such, there are additional tax forms that need to be filed each year that the business is in operation.

A self-employed person who makes $400 or more in profit during the year, has to declare that income to access taxes.  This also applies to church employees who earn more than $108 and didn’t receive a W-2 reporting form.  The IRS forms will determine what taxes if any need to be paid.

All self-employed persons must file a Schedule SE form in addition to the 1040 form.  The Schedule SE form has a long and a short version.  The form has instructions concerning who needs to fill it out.  This form records the total earnings of the business or trade enterprise, the amount of tax according to IRS calculations, and the tax amount after a fifty percent deduction is applied.

This amount may not be the final tax owed on the profit of the business.  There is another form where people list the profit or loss from their business enterprise.  This form is called a Schedule C.  Any portion of the profit that was funneled back into the business to fund expenses is recorded here on specific lines.

The total profit received into the business is reported here, just like it was recorded on the Schedule SE.  Freelancers and independent contractors may have a business account where they record each payment transaction to determine this amount.  Anyone who has an ongoing contract with you for services will be subject to sending you a 1099 form.  This form details the amount of money paid to you for work done in the tax year.

Home based businesses can use this form to record any expenses for the business use of the home.  This amount is transferred from another form, Form 8829, where the amount of the home deduction is determined.  Information about the use of your vehicle for business use is recorded on the Schedule C form.  Businesses that deal in inventory for their products have room in Part III to list that information and the dollar amounts.

The Schedule C form is useful in determining the amount of taxes that you will pay.  A tax professional will be able to tell you all of the deductions that you are qualified to take against your profits to lower the amount of taxable income.  Exemptions are even better because they lower the amount of taxes to be paid.

For complete instructions on filing a Self-Employed Tax Form consult with your tax preparer or visit www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040sc.pdf

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