Affordable
Home Based Business OpportunityIf it is cheap, it is not an
affordable home based business opportunity.
Why?
Any home based business needs a
certain amount of input: Your financial
investment, your time, your skills or a combination of all of these
things.
If an opportunity is cheap, it
is likely to need a
lot of your time and your skills to make it work. Otherwise, why would
anyone want to sell it? They could just put a bit more money into it
and get even better returns.
After all, any business is about
generating an income (and doing the things you love). So whenever you are presented with an
affordable
home based business opportunity, ask yourself what other input is
necessary to get a return. And is the return likely to satisfy your
needs.
Estimating the Return
This is one of the secrets I
still have not
understood. How is it possible to estimate what the return will be for
a certain offer or promotion?
Have you had a look at an
affiliate network (e.g.
ClixGalore and Commission Junction)? You will notice that they show the
average earnings for affiliates from each merchant.
I had found this merchant whose EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) was
around $50. So on average, every click would earn $0.50. That sounded
pretty good. At the time I had just discovered Google AdSense
(Google’s
advertising program).
It was possible to get some great keywords for $0.10 per click. That
was a pretty easy calculation: Each click I paid for would increase my
investment 5-fold! On average that is.
So I wrote some ads, set my
minimum daily budget to $100 and kicked the campaign off.
Wow, I would earn $400 per day,
just for having spent two hours researching and writing a few simple
ads.
I had been one of those people
who checks stats
daily. Realizing that this was mostly a waste of time, I had just made
a decision to only check weekly and spend my time more productively.
What happened?
I learnt a great lesson.
Nothing Beats Checking
After a week, I went into my
Google Account and saw
that over 10,000 people had clicked on my ads. Already calculating my
profit, I went to the affiliate network and saw:
Income: $72.
12 people had actually gone ahead and signed up (for a free service -
mind you!)
The Google costs were somewhere
around $1,000, producing a loss of 92.8%.
And I had been so certain!
So whenever I start a new
project now, I check every step of the way. No adequate return? I tweak
something until it works.
And I see an affordable home
based business opportunity, I check even more thoroughly.
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