Get a surge of business to your website or online business by applying these simple tactics to your website – starting now!

A free report

Crafts on the internet, or if you rather, crafting websites are a wonderful way for crafters to get acceptance or profits from their crafting goods and abilities by owning and marketing a craft internet site online.

I am so emotional about these two words that putting them together makes me all thrilled about explaining to you all the realistic opportunities that there are in relation to crafts online.

General overview

Websites, blogs and crafting forums are online in their millions and this is good. The common trend is for crafters to not be very marketing wise and they sometimes teach each other which well known crafting sites online are the ones where they can go to and promote the goods that they have manufactured.

While this is a very acceptable way for all the artists and crafters to earn dollars you will never get extremely affluent using this option.

Ok, so there are many ways that a hobbyist that does not want to turn themselves into a big business, and would be happy to to still have time to do their hobbies and run their businesses, can get ahead online with their websites

Serious about business?

If you aren't motivated by the option that you could get a great income from your hobby then I respect that, I would also prefer to be able to only need to share my efforts with those friends that I have both offline and online and not need to earn a living from my crafting items.

If you are more than happy with the friends version, a simple blogger website or one of the free Word-press websites might be enough for your needs, and then you could go and join some of the chat rooms and pretty soon you will have all your needs taken care of online.

But if you are thinking of having a more serious businesslike online business, then a few different things that you will need to take care of with your website. However this is rather a longish list and I would not have the space to go into all the details here, but suffice to say that you would need to take the idea very seriously. Have fun by all means but you will need to adhere to a step by step plan and then you will then need to stick to for your commercial enterprise to reach its end result.

Possible problems

Having any sort of internet presence can and in fact will certainly affect your manufacturing time. That is and more than like always be the biggest problem with crafters that are also online, a business domain needs a minimum of two hours a day for it to develop and flourish online and if you commence to neglect that side of your crafting site then you might fail.

Another problem here is that if you do not have a mentor that has vast marketing experience about the internet, you might find yourself endlessly searching for education and worse testing incorrect marketing systems. Beware of this issue.

Opportunities

Selling your crafts online is good because it allows you to choose which direction you would prefer your website or internet business to develop in. You could do wholesale and sell in bulk to different crafting outlets around your country. You could even write and promote e books and reports and sell those to newbies that need training.

Finally you could simply take orders on your crafts and sell them direct to people who would prefer to buy directly from you.

The future

I am a firm believer that the craft business will grow stronger and stronger online; It is fast becoming easier to do web seminars and other methods of interaction with people all around the world. I believe that there will come a time when we seldom even notice that the world is really becoming smaller and we will be happily ensconced in it and still doing our crafting.

I know that websites that we now call membership sites will have become common place, and artists from all over the world will be co operating with each other on many levels.

Are you going to be involved in it?

Getting the best advice possible

I have a lot of flea market experience, and now 26 months of internet marketing, and the combination of these two skills can be a massive advantage to your craft business. If you would like more details or any help at all, I suggest that you contact me, get the free report or purchase my training course on Flea markets and craft markets

Get a Free Copy of My Small crafting business report here

Getting great flea market ideas is the first step to a profitable home business

I have put up a short list here on some ways to get your flea market ideas all planned out and then put into action.

Firstly I do need to tell you that I have a full training product that does a comprehensive training system - all designed to get you small home crafter business into a really profitable zone.

At the end of this page I also offer you a free get-started-report

Here are a few tips to get you started.

RESEARCH METHOD ONE

•Go to ALL your local markets and make a list of every type of flea market stall at that market.

•Try to make a note of how busy they looked – did they always have customers?

•Put them into categories on a spread sheet (or in a note book)

RESEARCH STEP TWO

•Take out all the quiet looking products.

•Make up a short list of the 10 busiest product types

•Choose three of those that you think might be a product that you would like to produce and sell

STEP THREE

•Go to your computer – do keyword research on EXACTLY what the most popular terms are for that product

•E Mail me for help here – if you do not know how to do this step

•Now you know exactly what people want.

•Take action!!!

NEXT STEP

•Once you know what is popular, and which part of that product is the most popular – get started.

•I suggest choosing the biggest product in that list. EG – do not make a jewellery box if you could make a jewellery cupboard.

PRODUCT RESEARCH DONE

•Now you need to do the next business steps

•A proper business plan

•Financial research

•How your business will grow

•Step by step start up system

•YOU ARE NOW IN BUSINESS

IMPORTANT STEP

•Get your website built first

•It takes time for a website to grow – so the sooner you start the sooner your site will become busy

•Do your website properly – e mail me for details on that one

GET THE FREE REPORT

Download a copy of my free report. It should give you a head start into the crafter and flea market business.

Thank you

Rob Anderson

freeguide.jpgSmall

Hi, just a quick post to let those of you who might be interested in looking
into getting a craft business of the ground and into a profitable business,
I posted a short video that will lead you to a free report that I wrote for
small home business and work from home people.

A lot of crafters are all very capable at their chosen crafts - but do not
have the skills or the time to learn how to get a website that actually
makes them money up and online.

This report will at the very least get you started in the right direction.

Here is the link to the video

Thanks

Enjoy

Rob

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Getting great craft ideas is almost as much fun as starting to do the actual craft.

What I probably need to point out quickly is that everybody looks for craft ideas for different reasons. Firstly let me cover the different searching types, and then I will show you some great places to get ideas and inspiration.

Existing crafter with existing tools

This person that is looking for craft ideas and has already got the tools and systems in place in their home to be able to do that specific craft – and is simply looking for inspiration for new projects.

Brand new crafters

Someone who is creative and wants to discover all the different ways that they could express their talents by starting up a small crafting idea from their home, either as a hobby or as a small home business.

Crafters looking to make money from their idea – or from new ideas

Crafters are known to want (or is it needJ) to try new and different crafting things and methods. One of the nicest things about doing crafting is that for everybody things turn out differently. If you sat down with a group of 10 crafters and you all made exactly the same thing, they would still all turn out differently.

Because of the crafter training systems that I offer I also realise that even those searching for profitable ideas need to be taught how to search for new and different crafting ideas.

Crafting types that are looking to make money from crafting

Now this is different, because when you are looking for a money making crafter idea you are really doing keyword research and niche research.

You would still need to follow the links that I have included below, but you would also need to do more intensive keyword research.

Places to get craft ideas and inspiration

·         Blogger is often one of the best sources, as bloggers that are also crafters have found each other and link between their sites. Also blogger itself has a system where you can search for blogs within the blogger site. Nice!

·         Searching Google and the other search engines, by putting in search terms like “how to make” – very often those tricks will bring up ideas that you had not thought of before.

·         Search online for you keyword but add forums to the search string. For example crafter forums, beading forums or scrapbook forums and you should get a great source of websites that you could join and meet other like minded crafters.

·         Go to Amazon or Google books and look through their stock to get ideas, and even buy some of their books to keep as a reference.

Keyword Research

Using the yellow pages as a keyword research tool is something that is not new but is a vital tool in m y research armoury.

Keyword research is absolutely one of the most important aspects to focusing your marketing and knowing exactly where you buyers are.

I do a lot of small business consulting, and I see time and again that those businesses that are correctly focused at their strongest buying segment are the ones that have the best chance of being an ongoing success.

What you need to know is that if you have followed all the different ways that I suggest in doing correct keyword and market research for your product – you will have a very clear picture of who your buyers are and where they hang out.

I have written some articles on some great flea market ideas, and how to do the research for your flea market business.

If you are planning to do something along the lines of a small home business and take it to the flea markets to make some money, then I suggest that you follow me very carefully.

I have over 30 years experience in the work from home field, and have now taken this experience online and have done a lot of articles and videos all designed to help you get started.

I suggest that before you do anything – that you come to my blog and look at the research videos that I have been producing along the topics of keyword research and other methods of research all designed to give you the best results out of the planning stages of your business idea.

In fact even if you already have a business that is set up and running and you are looking for methods to improve your turnover, you can still get a great benefit out of watching my research videos.

Please feel free to come and visit my blog to get the details on the free training and videos related to getting your flea market business idea working properly.

Thanks for your time

Rob Anderson

Many large and small businesses alike have recently discovered the great advantages of blogging in maintaining good communication relationships with both employees and customers.

 It is obvious that for some people, using a blogging platform at very advanced levels and this can only mean increased earnings for the company.

It is common knowledge by now that small businesses profit the most from blogging.

Why?

Because a highly specific web page such as a blog, successfully replaces an extensive  presence. Instead of a inactive page, you offer a very high-powered blog where interaction is encouraged and various subjects get tackled with.

Many Internet experts consider blogs a very informal, yet popular way of developing business connections, since, the informational content receives a unique approach than in the case of classic promotion websites. Business owners can definitely enjoy great recommendations from users, but there are also dissatisfied customers who could review the products or services unfavourably.

You'll have to be prepared to handle such situations with the utmost diplomacy in order to avoid a worsening of the situation. On the other hand, a business blog provides the opportunity to run market research and avoid hiring employees that don't fit requirements.

Business blogs also function as the right tool to spread news to all the employees at once; this kind of blog program is usually preferred by larger businesses who can reach the staff in a more comfortable way and on a daily basis.

Statistics claim that blogging significantly contributes to team building and communication between the departments of the same company; hence, there has been an increased preference for blogging over memo's. Nevertheless, we also have to mention the more difficult aspects of business blogging as well.

For instance, maintaining an updated blog requires quite a lot of time and work, it may even be necessary to have someone perform all the operations on a regular basis. Then, the e-commerce possibilities are fewer when it comes to using a blog over a standard site; you may find it very advantageous to start blogging when you just initiate your business online, but then, you may choose to use it in parallel with a regular promotion site, once things get to look brighter. If at the beginning you take advantage of the minimal costs required by a business blog, later you need to monitor efficiency first and foremost.

To get more Information on how blogging can help your business please go to this webpage here, http://websitemedic.co.za/blog/ or if you would like to get a well priced video course on article marketing then please look at this page here, http://www.websitemedic.co.za/articlemarketing/

Thanks for your time.

Rob Anderson.

Small business advisor, Johannesburg - South Africa.

Search optimisation is fairly new in south Africa

– at least on a par with the high quality being put out in the more established Internet countries.

I have written this report to help local South Africans get a better grip on seo in South Africa.

Hi - My name is Rob Anderson

I have written this short report to help South African Business owners get the best out of their websites. I have been doing search engine optimisation and social marketing for my own websites and for select clients and am aware of all the work involved.

You and I are being lied to EVERY day by all the hundreds of new website promotion companies that have suddenly sprung up all over the place.

These people are taking advantage of the fact that you are still new to all the intricacies of website marketing.

Firstly I want to tell you about some of the “myths” that South African’s believe about their websites. These have shown up often in my marketing efforts.

MYTH NUMBER ONE – My website is working fine – Thank you.

Whenever I talk to website owners as many as 90% of them believe that their websites are still functioning at 100% capacity.

While this might be true of a few, the chances are that your website is running at as little as 5% of what its true potential really is. Google is the main search engine and has undergone three MAJOR algorithm changes in the last 18 months. Every one of those changes brought about MASSIVE changes to how your results feature on the search engine results pages.

Your website is probably the online equivalent of a 3310 cell phone – it can make calls and receive messages, but little else.

 Just because it still looks pretty does not mean that it is functioning at all.

MYTH NUMBER TWO – My webmaster did all the SEO for my website

Back-in-the-day website designers and developers could get away with simply doing meta tag keyword and a few other small things to your website, and then “index” your website on a few search engines and get away with it.

It was enough.

Google’s spiders would see that information and rank you on the correct pages accordingly. NOT ANY MORE! Now there are literally dozens of different factors that are taken into consideration before your website will find its way to the number one position one.

Remember that the busier the internet becomes the less chance that the badly done sites will have to remain on the top of the results.

MYTH NUMBER THREE – I do not really need a website

That comment makes me start to laugh hysterically, I still cannot believe that there are people that are clever enough to have started and run a small business successfully and actually think that they do not need a website.

Now it is possible that a guy who grows macadamia nuts might not need a website – but the rest of South Africa does.

South Africans now number in the millions online and it is growing at a 45% rate annually. Can you afford to cut them all out of your business plans?

MYTH NUMBER FOUR – Once it is built – you can leave it alone

Old school thinking again

This comes back down to all the newest developments that are happening daily online. The internet is morphing and growing at such a fast rate that it is in fact a full time job just to keep up with those changes. Believe that and you would be better off selling you business today while it still has value.

I have seen my sites start to drop down the rankings within days of me slowing down with my social marketing efforts.

MYTH NUMBER FIVE – It is too difficult to do myself

While I will admit that there are literally dozens of small tasks that you need to do to your website monthly to keep your position on top of the search engine results pages, they are not hard to do.

I find doing internet banking harder to do than to build an entire website. I will willingly give you all the free e books that you need to learn these small tasks that you need to succeed.

I also have a service that does all that work for you.

Essentially if you can go onto Facebook or register for an e mail address – then you are capable of doing internet marketing.

The only drawback to doing the job properly is that it involves lot of daily tasks.

MYTH NUMBER SIX – People do not spend money online

While this is fairly true as far as South Africans consumers are concerned, more and more are doing it and by the time your website is featured on page one of 20 different keywords you might find that this has already changed.

HOWEVER!!!

What you need to think about very seriously is this fact, South Africans now all do their research online! They do not use the yellow pages at all anymore.

Just ask around – and you will find that almost everybody uses Google as their first choice of information gathering.

See my picture examples later in this report showing all the “phone numbers” in a Google search.

If your telephone numbers are prominent online then you will get the inquiry!

MYTH NUMBER SEVEN – There is still time to worry about it later.

To get your website solidly entrenched into the number one position in the search engine results pages per keyword can take up to six months of daily work.

It is possible to be featured on certain terms almost immediately, but for your actual website to feature above all the directories and other web 2.0 websites takes constant work to your website.

 Why would you let you opposition get an advantage like that over your business?

What needs to be done to a website to make it happen properly?

Stop anyone who is charging you to do SEO work on your website if they are not doing all the following things to your website, or at least insist that they give you value for your money.

So many of these newcomers are charging fees of R5000 and more per month to simply put your website onto business directories online, and that is daylight robbery.

Perhaps they are even doing a few more things to your website like getting you back links etc, and if so – that is great. I highly suggest that if you are already using a SEO specialist that you use this following list to check against the services that they are offering you.

STEP ONE. KEYWORD RESEARCH

This part is of such vital importance that if done wrong your efforts could be wasted completely.

Make 100% sure that you have done your keyword research properly as almost all the following tasks revolve around you needing to work from this initial keyword base.

STEP TWO. SETTING UP YOUR “LEAD VALVES”

Whilst this is not a big secret, so many of the “opposition” of mine do not seem to have a clue as to how to do these, that I choose to keep most of these to myself. These are the many small registrations and actions that your SEO expert needs to do on many different sites to have your website feature prominently on the local search results.

I am not going to list all of them here, as they are a big advantage to how I do the business for my clients – when I do the social web 2.0 marketing for their websites.

However I will say that this includes things like getting your business registered on a lot of online business directories. BUT I use about 4 or 5 different methods and they all will still need to “promoted” using some of, or all of the next few steps that I am going to be telling you about.

DAILY FRESH CONTENT TO YOUR WEBSITE

Google values fresh content (original) on your website very highly, and whilst you can get away with duplicate content it is better to pen your own articles for the best results.

This covers building pages as well as submitting posts, and all of these activities need to be indexed and back linked for the maximum impact. Two or three back links per item should be enough.

Please remember to add images every time and to optimise those images with the correct keywords for the best results.

Always interlink your pages.

Always deep link your websites pages.

SOCIAL MARKETING

This can either be a very large part of your marketing strategy or simply be used for your back linking.

Websites like twitter and Facebook have massive traffic daily and for you to not tap into that traffic would be very silly indeed. I admit, for example, that I am not very fond of spending a lot of time on twitter, but having said that if you started off on twitter with the correct methods you can gain HUGE amounts of traffic for some products using twitter.

I have had over 20 000 twitter followers for more than a year, and use the service daily.

FORUM MARKETING

Another excellent way to get very highly targeted traffic to your website and a great way to build high quality back links is to market on the forums.

VIDEO MARKETING

This has grown into a very powerful method of marketing, and as South Africa gains in bandwidth speeds so your visits will increase. Those that are well established already will never need to worry about their opposition again.

Again with this method of marketing there is the easy way and there is the correct way. Please ask me for some of the free e books on this subject

E MAIL MARKETING

Everybody loves to hate e mail marketing – yet it remains one of the most powerful methods of marketing ever.

I have a free report that you can download from my main website on this subject if you would like to learn more about e mail marketing.

As a quick “by the way” here, recently a well known international internet marketer did a launch of his product – driven by e mail, and he made over $1 million in 24 hours. (Chris Farrell – if you are interested)

VIRAL MARKETING

This is a form of marketing that I am experimenting with at the moment.

Viral marketing can include aspects like competitions or free products – usually things that people are willing to share with their friends.

 I love the idea of posting a comment onto Facebook and seeing that it can go viral through people “liking” the post and turning things like a YouTube video into a few million views.

This is normally driven by comedy or shocking things, and could perhaps be detrimental to your business. Take care.

BACK LINKING

This is absolutely essential to your website, and when done properly can jump your website over far bigger opposition websites.

However it is a very tedious job and because of that most people neglect it.

This is one of the main services that I offer to small businesses.

MASSIVE FOOTPRINT

This is my own term, as I love the idea of building up a nest of related websites that will allow you to completely dominate your niche online.

Please remember that for every new website that you add to your arsenal you bring with it another few hours of work a day.

Blogging sort of falls under this category (often called blog farms) and can be a very powerful method of gaining huge traffic to your websites. It is also frowned upon by Google – even though they own Blogger.

Naturally it would not be necessary if your niche is not that competitive – like “steam trains” but if you are in a competitive niche like “weight loss” you can really clean up in the local market.

ARTICLE MARKETING

Another very effective method of marketing your website, it is time consuming, but over time can grow to a point where you need not work on your website for months at a time, as your traffic will keep “leaking” in from hundreds of different sources.

Please note that there is very definitely a right way and a wrong way to do article marketing.

This is another of the services that I offer as part of my website medic business.

PRESS RELEASES

An absolutely fantastic method of getting your products noticed, and very good for back linking, and again if you do it the right way your website could skyrocket onto page one for certain keyword terms.

MORE and MORE

There are a number of extra ways to keep working through social media and other outlets that would keep me listing marketing tools here to you all day, but needless to say some of those are perhaps more specific to certain types of websites.

An example is running a forum based website, or a classified website connected to your website.

Do you also have thousands of PLR articles?

Here are a few ways that you could use those articles and gain some great results for your efforts.

You could also use legally copied articles for this project – as long as you still retain each author’s links in their resource box.

Turn them into E Books.

Remember that if you are using PLR you do not need to rewrite them to make them original or fresh content as you are not going to publish it online – only keep the articles in an E book format. Naturally you could repair or freshen them if they do not have up to date content.

OK – Here is how you do it…

1.      Open a Word document.

Plan some sort of continuity or flow to your e book. Try to make the topics start and run in some sort of order or system.

 Do an index for your articles, remember that 20 articles or so is still a report, and 50 pages becomes a book. You can choose the size based on how many articles you have at your disposal.

Then copy and paste the articles onto your word doc. In the order you had planned.

2.      Add Pictures and Format

Simply add pictures where necessary, do some bold heading etc.

 How you do your formatting of the document will make a big difference to the reaction your e book will have on the readers.

 If you are not sure how to do the look – or formatting, simply find a PDF on your computer that you like the look of, and sort of copy that style.

3.      Make an E Cover

If you have the skills, make yourself an e cover for your new book. If you do not know how there are a lot of services that could make you an e cover fairly quickly. Hell – if you contact me, I will design you a cover cheaply.

4.      Add your Resources

If you are doing all this for love alone, then you do not need to add any form of resource at the end, but most of us are promoting something or other, so go on – add your links at the end.

5.      Tweaks and more

You are now in a position to finalize your new e book, and can add small details like your picture or any other thing that you feel might help the overall effect that your e book will want to portray. Do not waste hours doing this. I good report can be done this way in less than a half an hour. Remember that you started with PLR articles in the first place. Set yourself a time limit, say 2 hours, and when that time is up, finish the book!

6.      Turn it into a PDF

I do not plan to give you a long lesson here on how to make a PDF if you do not know. The best way to find out, if you do not have a clue is to watch some videos on youtube.

Ok, so “print” your document into a PDF, and save it.

Now that that is done – What the hell can you do with it?

1.      Make a sales page

You could get a domain, and actually use the e book as you main draw card to visitors to your website, where you will give it away for free to build up an e mail list.

2.      Use it on giveaways

If your topic is popular enough, like membership websites, you could build up a nice list on the giveaways.

3.      Sell you book

If you have collected decent quality articles, and have added a bit, you could sell your e book for some cash.

4.      Membership sites

You could add your report to your membership website. You could negotiate to get membership to a membership site by supplying weekly reports for that site.

 The ideas could go on forever, making up Ezines, using the reports for podcasts, turn them into videos etc.

Good luck with it all.

NOW FOR MY RESOURSES PAGE

I have a passion for small business and for marketing.

I am constantly testing and playing with new marketing ideas. So to try not to show you the millions (LOL) of services that I could offer you - I will feature only a few of the most popular.

1.      A very well priced video series called ARTICLES FOR NEWBIES. I am South African – so the sales page will show South African Rands but I am selling this video series for only $9.50.

Click here to go and see what it entails.

http://www.websitemedic.co.za/articlemarketing/

For the price of a pizza you could get some great videos.

2.      Do you have a small business and need it to get properly ranked on the search engine results pages? I offer a very well priced service here, and that way you might never need to write your own articles again.

Go to my websites main page for that service.

http://websitemedic.co.za/

3.      After that let me just say that I can do e covers, build websites, do your SEO work, set up an entire small business and even make you a hammock! If you are in need of free advice, I would help you with pleasure. Mail me at…

rob@websitemedic.co.za