There are so many mothers faced with the dilemma of how to care for their small children and contribute to the dreaded mortgage.  In the global financial crisis, this is an even greater need.  So many mothers would love to be able to both stay home and bring in a good income.

It is possible to have and online home business, make money online and still have time for your children.  A part time business with flexible hours is every young mothers’ dream.  This article outlines the steps you can take to make this dream a reality for your family.

Some of the most daunting things about getting started with an online business is simply knowing where to start, how to find clients and how much it is going to cost.

The first step is to work out what you really love doing or buying and spend time talking to your friends and searching on the internet to find out how many other people share your passion.  Whatever you are passionate about is what you will do best.  You will make time to fit it in because you enjoy it.  So this is where you start.  You need to find something people want that you enjoy.  And extending this research and joining Facebook, Twitter and other social networking groups will help you find your clients.

The next step is to break what you do into simple bite sized steps that you can email to clients.  You may well decide to ask your Facebook and Twitter friends as well as your offline friends if they would like to get a tip of the week about your passion, the build this up into a regular newsletter.  Once you have a list of interested people you can start to sell your product.

You will need a website an auto responder system and a means of collecting money but this can be kept low cost by avoiding the bells and whistles.

Your website tells people what you do and to get started a simple 3 page site then asks people to opt in for more information and your free tips of newsletter on one page, which leads to a longer page (really pages) giving real value and letting people know how you can help them and asking them to take an action like phoning or faxing for more information, buying a low priced product or sometimes even asking them to buy your high priced product or service.  The third page is a thank you page.  Three pages are not expensive but you need to do your research carefully on what people actually want to buy rather than what you want to sell.

You will need an auto responder system and this is another thing that start up home business people worry about.  If you simply think of them as a means of sending a series of emails automatically to deliver your product or your tips and information, they are easily demystified.  These can be quite low priced and a simple payment system like PayPal can be adequate to start making money online with a home based business.

An important step can be to find someone who is able to explain things that confuse you in a non “geeky” way so that you are not confused by the jargon that some internet users love.

I do hope that this article has helped demystify the biggest obstacles preventing you from effectively leveraging your skills and hobbies so that you can make money from home doing something that you really enjoy.

For more information and regular tips, hints and updates go to www.onlinejeanie.com or opt in to get my free report at the top of the home page

Onlinejeanieblog

OnlineJeanie helping put your business online

Jean Cannon is an expert at turning effective offline products and services into digital products and training programs and is generous in the extent that she shares this expertise. And she is able to do this in a very "non-geeky" way with lots of support that anyone is able to follow. She also runs an award winning online environmental consultancy.

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You will be surprised at how easy it is set up your online business.  Small business people are discovering that going online allows them to extend their business and reach more customers without increasing their workload significantly.  They find there are a variety of ways to start business online.

The secret to turning an existing service or product into an online version is to really understand your target market and their preferred way of learning.  Then you are in a position to package it into small manageable chunks that that can be delivered digitally with a series of automatic emails or auto responders and teleconferences

When I decided to expand my established consultancy business by also working with clients online the big question was how.  And this was closely followed by how much will it cost?  Then where do I start?

I asked these questions because I work with widely scattered small businesses and I was often working with them in groups so that they could share the costs.  We all ended up travelling.  Me most of all as I flew somewhere almost every week to either work one-on-one with larger remote clients or to run two day workshops with small businesses.  It was very lucrative but exhausting and the small clients were asking me if we could work online.  I gulped and said yes but it will take time.  Then I started asking around and searching the internet.  I was offered help at $100,000 per module – so I said no.  I spent a year doing course after course to find out how to pull this all together.

So here is the secret.  There are four critical steps you need to take to put your business effectively online.

1. Find your clients and this is easier than ever before with a range of free marketing tools like article marketing, social networks, video marketing added to the long established tools like speaking, networking, publicity and the paid avenues like adverts and advertorial all aimed at driving traffic to your website and building trust with e-zines and teleseminars.
2. Make sure your product is what your clients want and delivered in a way that your clients can handle. Many of the marketing tools listed in the point above can be used to research your target market before you put a lot of effort and expense into finalising your product.  You can use articles and social media to gauge the response to ideas.  If they do not get viewed or create interest, perhaps you need to try something else or a subtle variation that is more attractive to your market.  Where you might have paid huge amounts of money to market research agencies in the past, you can now do this same research online by yourself and prevent very costly product to market mistakes.
3. Put your business on auto pilot with autoresponders. Fully digital products can be setup with an auto responder to be delivered immediately by an auto responder linked to your shopping card.  A twelve week training program can be set to deliver small bite sized pieces of information each week so that all you need to do is enrol your clients into the auto responder on the start day and run a weekly teleconference, knowing that as your clients paid upfront, they received an automatic receipt and welcome message telling them they would be contacted on the set date to commence the course.
4. Have easy methods of collecting money – upfront before you deliver.  How massively unlike so many offline small businesses who invoice after the job them wait while the client hangs onto your money.

Just how hard is that?  There are literally only four critical things to master and they are all very straightforward.  What a change to give up chasing overdue invoices and know that you are being paid very much higher fees per hour than anything your offline business managed.

Onlinejeanieblog

OnlineJeanie helping put your business online

Jean Cannon is an expert at turning effective offline products and services into digital products and training programs and is generous in the extent that she shares this expertise. And she is able to do this in a very "non-geeky" way with lots of support that anyone is able to follow. She also runs an award winning online environmental consultancy.

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The hardest skill to learn is to write good copy for your business or for your website website and not sound deadly boring.  Your business must sell to somebody because this is how you get paid but think about what you are really selling.  Are you selling pumps or are you really selling the peace of mind knowing that water is arriving where it is needed, when and in the right quantity?

I have a long way to go with this yet and I am going to join my friend Pete Godfrey at a small, intensely private workshop around Australia on the subject of writing Sales Letters that sell.  Pete really is a brilliant copywriter and teacher.
Plus he is a thoroughly nice guy and fun to be with.

If you’ve ever sweated over an ad, taken ages to complete a simple letter; or you’re a business owner who wants to know how to create sales letters that sell, then you need to take your seat at his upcoming Sales Letter Writing Workshops.

I’ve already bought my ticket and I will be at the Adelaide workshop but there is not a lot of time to make a decision..

Trust I’ll see you there.
Here are the dates
Sydney: Tuesday 28th July – sorry it is too late for this one
Melbourne: Saturday 8th August
Perth: Saturday 15th August
Adelaide: Sunday 16th August
Brisbane Tuesday 18th August

Onlinejeanieblog

OnlineJeanie helping put your business online

Jean Cannon is an expert at turning effective offline products and services into digital products and training programs and is generous in the extent that she shares this expertise. And she is able to do this in a very "non-geeky" way with lots of support that anyone is able to follow. She also runs an award winning online environmental consultancy.

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Here are some special tips to help your online business better leverage your expertise and bring you increased profits

When you start business online by putting one of the products or services that you have been using offline for some years you may fail to understand how to break the information into small bite sized pieces.

The first step you need to take is to carefully define your product.  Sometimes things that are very clear to you, may have left out a simple step that is not obvious to you client and results in confusion and frustrations.

The two first and vital steps are to decide
•    what platform and format you are going to use to deliver your product and
•    how you are going to “chunk” it so that they receive manageable amounts of information at a time.

The starting place needs to be thinking about your target client because if your product does not suit their needs they simply will not buy it.

There are a number of things you need to find out including what style of delivery suits your clients.  Do they have high speed broadband or are they on a slower wireless connection or maybe on an even slower dial up.

You also need to be sure that you know and can cater for his or her learning styles.
•    Some people learn best by reading, others learn by listening and most people benefit from having both. So how are you going to deliver the information
•    Busy People often don’t have time to sit down and read and you may well be surprised at how many people can’t read or have limited reading ability.
•    Busy People often find that at the end of the day they are exhausted and can’t face reading and their logical processing is full for the day.  If you can provide them an easy option that is relaxing to listen to or watch while they sit and relax with a drink it will be taken in by the emotional part of their brain and the learning may actually be more effective.

You also need to “chunk” your information into small bites with the size depending on how much they can take in at a time.  You should put yourself in your client’s shoes.  You are working full time and trying to learn something new.  How much can you take in at a time when you are tired?  Think about whether you can split it into small bites and still keep it in a sensible order.

Without going into your delivery platform at this time, you do need to think through the format of your information.  Which you choose depends of your clients and the research into their needs and likes before you started.

The critical thing is to do your market research first to that you deliver a good product market match.  While you may well decide that the bells and whistles and high resolution video is wonderful if it does not work on your clients’ computer or arrive reliable on his email he will not only be unhappy but unhappy clients do tend to pass on the word.

This is the way I have been sucessfully working in my environmental consultancy for several years now  and I have been able to stop flying around the country and work with widly separated clients online instead.

I can show you how to do this and give you regular simple tips if you opt  at the top of the page or go to www.onlinejeanie.com

Onlinejeanieblog

OnlineJeanie helping put your business online

Jean Cannon is an expert at turning effective offline products and services into digital products and training programs and is generous in the extent that she shares this expertise. And she is able to do this in a very "non-geeky" way with lots of support that anyone is able to follow. She also runs an award winning online environmental consultancy.

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If you are one of the many people who want to extend your existing business into the online environment; add an extra online component; you have an idea to allow you to work from home while your children are small; or you want to build an online capability to provide more choices to supplement your superannuation which has recently diminished then you are probably wondering where on earth to start, what you need to know and who you can trust.

Four years ago that was also me.    I had quotes from people to put my consultancy online for six figure numbers and I would still have needed to work with them to get it right and pay for updates and modifications.  I wanted to know how to put my business online myself and be able to change it with changed circumstances.

There are services that:
•    Will “do it for you” at great expense but you need to be sure that you have the ability to update things because nothing stays static
•    Others that provide you with a complete website and web business “ready to go” but these are not about your passion and it is very hard to have changes made and lots of people start enthusiastically with these then find that they do not work for them
•    Teach you about internet marketing and writing newsletters, both of which you do need to know
•    Provide tools for ecommerce, newsletter management, audio and video streaming
•    Provide a very standard membership site containing hundreds of the same articles and with the same very recognisable look and feel as everyone else who bought the same pack.

There are web developers who are:
•    designers and make beautiful websites that lack much of the function you need,
•    Programmers who do not understand the importance of design
•    Keen to push you into a rigid template that looks and functions like a template
•    There are a few web developers who employ both designers and programmers and
•    There are even less who also understand marketing.  These are the ones, you want.

There are very few services that pull all the different aspects together and allow you to set up and manage your own online business and continue to do so if circumstances change.

You will need to understand a wide range of skills so that you can make informed decisions about what you can sensibly outsource and what you need to do yourself.  These include writing compelling copy or words that sell on your website, marketing, keywords, where to include multimedia like audio and video and how to stream it, use of auto responders, teleconferences, webinars and of course ecommerce.  You need to produce your idea or service in a “chunked” digital form and you need to do the market research to find your market and what they want.

This all appears rather overwhelming but the “done for you” options seldom really work.  You need to be in control and include your passion because there is something very attractive about passion that makes sales so much easier.  Get yourself a trainer, mentor or coach who has done it themselves for their own main business, and make sure that your mentor understands your competence level.

Onlinejeanieblog

OnlineJeanie helping put your business online

Jean Cannon is an expert at turning effective offline products and services into digital products and training programs and is generous in the extent that she shares this expertise. And she is able to do this in a very "non-geeky" way with lots of support that anyone is able to follow. She also runs an award winning online environmental consultancy.

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Would you like to add an online version to your existing business or are you either a home based entrepreneur or someone who wants that lifestyle? Do you want to get away from all the internet hype and learn from someone who has done this already? Gain instant access to this fascinating FREE Report to…

Discover How To Turn Your Business or Idea into an Online Business.

Have you ever had a defining moment when you realised that you wanted a new income stream or a new direction?

Would you like to find the secrets of working with your clients online?

Do you want to leverage your skills effectively in an extra environment?

Let me explain

My Name is Jean Cannon and a defining moment in my life was 5 years ago when I broke my back the first time. Yes I did say first time – would you believe I did it twice. I was being too independent and tried to move a heavy planter using a crow bar – that is the wrong type of leverage to use.

It was my own fault but it made me stop and take stock of my life and I realised that if I was going to continue working as a sustainability and environmental consultant I would need to do it differently. At the same time, some of my widely scattered clients asked me if they could work with me online.

Of course I said yes. What an answer to my problem I thought until I started trying to find out how to do it. I had people offering to “do it for me” for 6 figure numbers or I had a plethora of courses to attend that all cost money and took time but none gave me the whole story.

I did spend the six figure dollars and took two years learning how to do what I do now.

I have been successfully running my consultancy and training online for the past three years. I no longer fly somewhere every week and I work with a wide variety of fascinating people around the world.

When I broke my back a second time in 2008 the result of a bus accident when I was thrown several metres without a landing plan, I was able to keep working and my clients did not know I was injured and in pain so although I had less energy for marketing and no networking, I kept the business going online.

And since then I have had major industry awards for my online training. I actually turned up to a black tie dinner to receive my FarmBis Award for Distance Learning/eLearning, wearing a brace while my back was broken.

This is real sustainability

YOU can create a sustainable lifestyle by learning all the secrets I needed to create my award winning training system, and more. I do give you the full story and all the hands on tools and training and I do it in bite sized chunks each week fully supported by audio files, interactive teleconferences and email support.

This will change your lifestyle in just 4 months!

Inside this Special Report called “Discover How to Turn Your Business or Idea into an Online Business” you will be empowered to…

Discover the secrets it took me years and countless dollars to find – in only 4 months!

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Reading this special report will be a defining moment in your business career so don’t miss out! You may be working too many hours for dollars right now or wondering how to earn money from home in the new economic circumstances. Now you can do something about it.

Onlinejeanieblog

OnlineJeanie helping put your business online

Jean Cannon is an expert at turning effective offline products and services into digital products and training programs and is generous in the extent that she shares this expertise. And she is able to do this in a very "non-geeky" way with lots of support that anyone is able to follow. She also runs an award winning online environmental consultancy.

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