Best Work At Home Ideas

You’ve seen the ads and the sales copy everywhere: How to make $300 (or $400 or $500 or….) a day with only fifteen minutes work, or a similar variation of the theme. Usually these kind of promotions are trying to sell you on the benefits of Pay Per Click (let’s use the common acronym PPC).

Let’s be clear: PPC is the most powerful method of direct response marketing known to the human race, period. And if there is one way that anyone can start making serious money on the internet almost instantly, then it’s PPC combined with affiliate marketing.

But what concerns me is that every sales letter I’ve seen extols the virtues of PPC without any reference to the dangers of using this method, especially for newbies on a limited budget. Yes, the dangers of PPC! Every PPC promotion should come with a health warning, something like this: Warning: PPC can destroy inexperienced users financially if used incorrectly.

You’ve no doubt heard the stories and read the testimonials of people who have had great success with PPC almost as soon as they started using it. Don’t be misled by these testimonials. Statistically it is normal that a small percentage of the population of PPC will have spectacular success through sheer good luck. Equally, a small percentage of PPC users will crash and burn. Most PPC users will fall somewhere in between. It’s what’s referred to in statistics as a normal distribution.

The first critical secret of PPC that you need to know is that you need a significant budget to succeed with PPC. Remember, we are talking about normal people, not the very lucky or exceptionally clever minority.

Let’s say you are targeting an income (profit) of $100 per day, or $3000 per month, using PPC and affiliate marketing. Now, if you have a very well set up campaign with a good converting product, you might expect a return of $2 for every $1 spent. That means that to achieve your income target of $3000 you need to spend $3000 on PPC:

PPC Spending __$3,000

Sales _________$6,000 ($2 earned for every $1 spent)

Profit _________$3,000 (Sales minus PPC Spending)

Notice I said “a well set up campaign”. I am also assuming a good converting product. It’s debatable how many people achieve these kinds of conversion numbers, especially newbies.

It gets worse than that. Typically you must pay for your PPC campaigns in advance, although Google Adwords allows you some credit. But most affiliate companies use a 30 day payment cycle, and they pay by bank check. Some, like Amazon, may use a 60 or 90 day cycle. A rare exception is Clickbank, which pays twice monthly. So while you need to spend your PPC dollars immediately, you will not get any return until sometime the following month. So typically you might not get paid for another 30 days after the end of the month in which you actually earned your income.

This effectively means that you need to budget for two months of PPC advertising. In our example that is an initial budget of $6,000.

You can do the numbers for your own situation, based on what you want to achieve. But to put this in perspective: when some guru claims that they made, say, one million dollars profit with PPC and affiliate marketing, it’s very likely that they spent somewhere near one million dollars in PPC advertising. A very sobering consideration, I think you’ll agree!

We are not done yet! More in my next post…….

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Cash flow is the life blood of any business regardless of size. So even though the costs of running a work at home business are about as low as business costs can ever be, they still exist. Most newcomers will underestimate these business costs. To make the situation worse, it’s likely that a newcomer will have an exagerated idea of the potential of a work at home business.

Fortunately, there are some relatively simple ways to generate extra cash flow while getting your core business up to speed. One of the best ways to earn some extra cash is to join a popular paid survey site, such as SurveyScout.

Paid surveys are widely promoted as a great way to make money for stay at home moms and dads, students,retirees, unemployed people, and anyone looking for an extra source of cash.

Let’s try to understand what a paid survey really is. The fact is that companies spend billions of dollars every year on what is commonly called market research. Success in business depends heavily on understanding your market, and knowing what your market wants. Market research today is extremely sophisticated, because the information gathered in this way can literally make or break a company.

A very common way and popular way to obtain information for market research is with surveys. Most people will have participated in a survey at some time or other. Surveys usually consist of a number of questions with multiple choice answers. Now, companies often spend vast sums of money hiring specialist market research companies to carry out surveys. The bigger companies will have their own market research departments. The point is that it costs a lot of money to do market research, and it costs a lot of money to prepare and conduct statistically valid surveys. Companies will usually seek responses from at least one thousand respondents in order for the survey to have statistically validity. The more respondents the better, of course. Ideally a company would like to survey everyone in the market. However, a total market survey is generally not feasible due to the sheer cost of such an undertaking.

One of the methods companies use to gather survey data that is useful is by paying individuals to participate in the surveys. And this is where we come in. Paid surveys are a method used by many large companies to gather information for market research. The purpose of a paid survey membership site is to maintain a database of companies that offer paid surveys, and to distribute those paid surveys to members. In other words, your membership fee gives you easy access to paid surveys being distributed by large numbers of companies. Imagine how difficult and expensive it would be if you had to find all these companies yourself. It is the database of membership sites that makes it feasible to earn worthwhile money from paid surveys.

Simply put, you complete the survey and the company pays you, usually by check. The more surveys you do, the more you earn. It’s still work, and in some respects it’s not much different to a job, but you can do the work at home, in your own time, and at your own pace.

So those people who claim that all paid survey sites are scams are misinformed. Some survey sites may indeed be scams, but there are scams in all industries. The better survey sites have been in business for a long time, and for good reason. They perform, and they keep their members happy.

“Can you make money with paid surveys?” Emphatically, yes! However, paid surveys are not going to make you rich. They are a way to earn some extra cash, and if you work at it, quite a lot of cash. But don’t expect more than that. They are very useful for anyone starting out with a work at home business that needs some extra cash flow while getting other more potentially lucrative areas of their business up to speed. And paid surveys are great for anyone who needs a simple easy way to get extra cash for any purpose. So as long as you understand the nature and limitations of paid surveys they really can be a great source of extra income. However, do stick with the more popular proven membership sites, like SurveyScout, and you can’t go wrong.

Click Here to Discover a Fast Easy Way to Make Money at Home.

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