Marketability Tools:
After we established that the business opportunity we are about to join is not a scam, we need to know if their business idea is marketable or not and if there is any chance of success in the particular niche market. The same is true for the associated products or services. There are many legit turnkey home based businesses opportunities that have great products or services, high quality websites, good business principles, but they are pure ‘duds’ as far as their money making potential because of a few reasons. Joining such opportunity is not much better than joining a scam. Because you’re going to invest time and money with nothing in return but a bitter taste about this ‘whole online business thing’!
In order to avoid that, we need to know if we can sell either the business idea itself (affiliate network marketing), the related products and services (direct selling) or both. And the simplest way we can use to find that out is to research the supply, demand and the competition by analyzing the keywords relevant to what we try to sell regardless if the selling is going to be done by us directly or by the turnkey system we just purchased.
All the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc) have free keyword research tools that will tell us exactly what is that people are looking for on the internet and how often. They also tell us important things about our competition if there is any. I like Google’s Keyword Tool and Yahoo’s but there are some other goods ones, including some pretty powerful in-depth analytical ones, like WordTracker, KeywordSpy, Keywords Elite, just to name a few, that for a hefty monthly fee can tell us everything about everybody in more than one way!
However, we have to use caution in using these tools because if we don’t know how to use the information they provide, we just going to throw money down the drain or even worse, get confused and sidetracked (eventually abandon our efforts) by interpreting the information incorrectly.
Google AdWords:
Google’s AdWords program is a paid advertising tool that allows an individual or a business to promote itself by displaying commercial text ads on Google search results pages (on the right column of any page). Although there is an entire industry evolving around AdWords, just by opening a free account and getting familiarized with the program we can get a great deal of information and tools that will allow us to understand important things essential to any business like supply and demand, competition, earning potential, marketing, etc. The other two major search engines, Yahoo & MSN have similar programs.
Pay-per-click advertising in general and AdWords in particular is one of the most cost efficient marketing methods for any home based business which allows to the one that masters it to drive a constant flow of laser targeted web traffic to a website at a very low cost! A home based business opportunity usually provide to the new business owners a turnkey website along with additional products and services. Since the site is a ‘turnkey website’, its owner has very limited access to its html code, which makes almost impossible to alter the code for search engine optimization purposes which makes the mastering of pay-per-click advertising even more important because it may be the only cheap way to effectively promote the site online.
