Profit from Twitter

Twitter seemed to emerge nowhere and take the e-business world by storm. When it first emerged, I thought it was ridiculous to be quite honest. Why on earth, in the Facebook heyday, would anyone want to be restricted to a few characters for updates, and on such a simple platform too.

I simply underestmated the power of Twitter and what it was to become. I now believe it is THE business tool that anyone who is looking to make money online needs to be using.

The question is: how on earth can I profit from Twitter?

First you need an audience which means you need a Twitter account. Depending upon the nature of your business, you may want your name to be your own name or your business name.

Your audience are your followers. Build a strong network of active followers. The aim is quality over quantity so you don't want to be following thousands of Twitterers and only have a few followers yourself. This tends to ndermine your credibility somewhat.

Providing useful information is key. Often you can use a tantalising intro, then, as many do, put your link in there for further information. Many sites get hits and earn revenue this way.

Offline (an online) home businesses can also use Twitter to advertise special offers to attrac custom. It's a free way to get your promotion out to a lot of people in one go.

Don't swear, don't write your personal secrets, don't use text-speak. Remember you are using this platform as a business. If you want to share your innermost secrets, do it through Facebook instead with your friends.

Link to new news items/posts/articles in your blog or wherever your internet base is. If you use affiliate or adsense modules, this can be a great way of attracting traffic to your site and hopefully, incresing your click through rate.

Like many businesses, I am new to Twitter and learning as I go. Please feel free to share your thoughts, Twitter profit strategies, knowledge or refuations to help others that land here looking for advice.

Oh, and if you want to follow me on Twitter, I can be found at http://twitter.com/theathomeworker. Let me know you found me here and i'll follow you back.

Selling for profit on Ebay

One of the simplest ways to start generating some cash is to start selling on eBay. You might start with a few bits and pieces you have lying around the house, but this guide lies in using eBay as a business to actually generate a profit and get you started in home based business.

This post is an in-depth guide to selling on eBay, however, this article gives a pretty good overview.

1. What to sell?

When trying to decide what to sell through eBay, you need to bear a few key points in mind. Many buyers on eBay are looking for something they can't easily obtain locally to them. Niche products go down really well and thanks to the lack of boundary on the internet, your market is the entire country, or continent or world if you want to risk selling abroad.

If you want to make money from mainstream products that you can get in your local supermarket, then section 2 of this guide is for you. However, if you go for the niche market, you have a huge potential market and a real business edge. Niche products currently on eBay are gold bullion, second hand designer clothes, special Chinese slimming tea, products not easily available such as Castor oil, beauty clays, collectables and antiques etc.


2. How to get people to buy from you

eBay attracts millions of customers and they all have just ONE thing in common - they want a bargain. The better the bargain, the more sales you'll make. Now anyone can put a low price on goods, but whether they would stay in business over the long term if selling below cost is another matter.

The key to selling cheap is buying cheap. That means sourcing products from wholesale rather than mainstream suppliers and at low cost. Generally, the more you buy, the cheaper you get it, so try to build long term relationships with your suppliers. This article will show you how to source suppliers and wholesalers and ideas on what you might sell.

3. Word of mouth - building your reputation

If anything, this is the most important factor in whether your eBay business will succeed or not. It is covered in depth in eBay: Selling for profit - a traders guide and I recommend you read it as it's importance cannot be underestimated.

Hopefully, when you start you your venture you will already have an account with some activity (feedback)on it from earlier sales/buys you may have done. If you have, then as long as your feedback is 100% positive, you already have a very good head start if you can adapt this account for your business.

If you don't already have an eBay account you can use, or don't have the best feedback on your current account, then you will need a new account to build up from scratch. This means sales might be slow to start with until you start to generate good feedback. If you struggle to do this through sales (as some buyers refuse to do business with sellers who have no feedback), it might be worth buying some items for yourself to get a reputation as someone who is trustworthy and pleasurable to do business with. It might still be difficult to sell high value items until your feedback is very well developed, however you can build up to it buy selling lower value items (preferably bargains) until you are up and running.

4. The Power of Words - advertising is key

The power of Marketing can not be underestimated when it comes to selling through eBay. Say you're selling a designer dress. If you put it on with no photograph, and few details apart from Size 12 Dress in Times New Roman font in the description it's not going to sell at any price. If you take several photographs showing different aspects of the garment, including close-ups of the material and an image of the label, then write a well thought out, full page professional description, your item will at least generate interest, if not sell well.

5. Get repeat business and keep those profits flowing

Never, ever send out a parcel of your goods without a reminder inside of who you are. Send out, at the very least, a printed slip with your eBay account, shop name, address, email address and contact details. Some good sellers often send money off vouchers with their packets to encourage the customer to return.

If you can, send everything by Recorded Delivery. It may seem like an unnecessary extra cost, but it protects against items going missing in the post or some unscrupulous buyers claiming the item was never received. Recorded delivery does not add a lot to selling costs when you consider the impact on profits of numerous 'not received' refunds you may get as your volume of sale increases.

Business Opinions - offering cash for opinions

Business Opinions is a relatively new opinion site which asks you for your views in order to help shape the future of business products and services. What's more, they're offering points which you can then turn into cash!

It is particularly aimed at those involved in their own business or in management, which is why I thought it would go down a storm here!

Three lifestyle questionnaires net you 50 points each and referrals get you a whopping 10 points, where each point is a penny. You can sign up here.

Domain Name Stress

You have a great idea and you're sure it's going to sell. You're going to sell kitten's mittens, they're going to be all the rage and you're going to retire next year on the proceeds.

There's just one snag - you surf over to your domain restration company and find that kittensmittens, mittensforkittens, mittysforkittys, catsgloves, mitsforkits and warmpaws have gone in all your desired domain suffixes. You can't think of anything else to call your site without it sounding ridiculous, so what should you do now?

1. Do some market research
This means looking at the sites that have 'your' names and see what they sell/do, google your product and see what other creative names people have come up with to sell their product etc.

2. Do some more market research
No, it's not a joke. There are two types of market research when it comes to internet markets. Why? Well, there is 'what people want', which is covered by approach 1, but there is also 'what people type into Google to find what they want'. This is crucial to the success of your internet business and can help you narrow down a good domain name. The best way to do this is to find out what people are searching for and you can do this using Google Zeitgeist which will allow you to see trends and identify keyword chains related to your site.

3. Make someone an offer
Someone has a domain you want, so you type it in to see what it is they're doing on there, only to find it's a parked domain. Someone has bought the domain you need and aren't even using it! Unless they're a private registrant, you can use a tool like whois to find out how owns the domain and contact them if you want to make an offer. If it's the ONE, and you're site is sure to be a success it's woth paying a bit more than you would if you'd bought it direct. There are also web based companies/auction sites tat deal in selling domains.

Home Business Ideas

So you want a little cash on the spare, or as is the case for many at the moment, you are currently not in work and you want to use the time to generate some income. The best way to do this is to work from home, but to do that, you need an idea.

Trying to decide what to base your home business on can be the most daunting part of actually doing it. We all have thousands of ideas on a daily basis, but we write them off because we don't think they'll work or there's too much competition already.

To help you out with this, as it's something I've struggled with in the past, I've got together 10 home business ideas you can get started with right away:

1. Child minding - if you're a lady (usually) and you are at home most days with your own children, why not offer a child minding service for parents who work. You could even offer a pick up service, where you pick up children from school and entertain them for a few hours until their parents finish work.

2. Sell on Ebay - and I don't just mean all your personal possessions! The trick with Ebay business is to buy low and sell cheap. Is there anyway you can find cheap stock which you can then sell for a profit on ebay? If you need some ideas about doing business on ebay, then look HERE at this article to get you started.

3. Home based administration - Many small companies struggle under the weight of administrative tasks. These are tasks that must be done to keep the business running smoothly but which do not add immediate value to the company. Lots of small companies will pay people to take this burden off their hands and will favour the option of using a self-employed secretary, thus reducing the overheads and legal burden of employing someone. For more info on how to get into home based office work, SEE HERE.

4. Set up an events organisation company - you could make money from home by organising coach trips to attractions or events. By negotiating on large numbers of hotel rooms, admissions etc, any difference between the package price and your costs is your profit. For example, you could organise a two night stay to blackpool. You would first call some suppliers (coach hire, hotels, theme parks...) and negotiate your prices to be as low as possible. Don't give up until you have the best prices!! Then work out your costs and work out how many people, at what price you need to at least cover this. This is your break even mark. Any more takers, or a higher price = profit.

5. E-shop - in the same vein as selling on Ebay, setting up your own internet shop by buying low and selling high is a good way to make money from home if you get the product right. Products that will sell well over the internet are usually products that it's not easy to go into a shop and buy, especially in rural areas. Don't forget too that if it's something quite common, the whole fun in buying over the internet for many is that they save money, so bear this in mind and try to choose high-margin products.

6. Blogging and article writing - this is a one for creative types with a flair for writing. By writing blogs, articles and even websites, you can generate an income. No, no one buys your writing unfortunately (unless you get talent spotted by a magazine or newspaper!), but you can generate considerable income from blogging and writing for the net. This is a very low cost way to make money from the internet and working from home and if you're good, you can make plenty. See HERE, HERE and HERE for more information on making money from blogs, articles and websites here.

7. Affiliate Marketing - Affiliate marketing can be very lucrative if you get it right. Its basic principle is that you get paid to refer customers to a company through your sites, articles and blogs. The trick is in getting those referrals and that means dedicating each affiliate site to one product and making it keyword rich and informative. There's so much more to affiliate marketing than we can get in this little ideas guide so start HERE for much more information and guidance on getting started.

8. E-lancing - E-lancers is the new term for freelancers who work through the internet. If you have any skills, knowledge or talent, there is probably someone out there willing to pay for some of it. There are many sites that deal with uniting elancers with people requiring elancers. See our GUIDE TO ELANCING here.

9. Cosmetics/products agent - Okay, so this is not entirely home based as you will have to go out and see clients, but selling products as an agent for a major company can be a great way to make extra money. To get a better idea of what you could sell, see our GUIDE HERE.

10. Sell your own expertise - why not base your home business around something you know well? If you're a techie, you could set up a techie site and forum. If you can do accounts, set up as a freelance book keeper. You can clean right? We can all clean - so why not set out as a mobile cleaner. You can even specialise in something, like cleaning for landlords or commercial premises. Think about what you can do, do your market research and go for it. Your best asset is yourself!