You Can Build A Better Home Biz Website

Author: Alyice Edrich

Have you ever visited a home business opportunity website and thought, “I can do better than that! There is nothing here but hype, unrealistic business schemes, and information that barely touches the surface of what I’m looking for. Why did I waste my time?”

You’re not alone. Thousands of Internet searchers run into the same problem.

A Little History

In the past, home business opportunity websites were designed to offer variety. The theory was, the broader the topics, the more traffic the website would attract, and the more advertisers would pay for key spots. Advertising rates skyrocketed and website owners cashed in.

Then came the dot com crash.

The Internet was no longer new and ad blindness made it almost impossible to find advertisers willing to pay top dollar.

That’s when performance-based advertisements (also known as affiliate marketing) and pay-per-click advertisers (Google Adsense™) came into play.

The idea was simple. Write articles that not only attracted visitors from the search engines, but convert them into clicks and sales. But would it work? Articles were written to draw in the visitor, point him to key information, hook him, pre-sell him on the product or service, and then get the sale (or in some cases, click).

And to everyone’s amazement, it worked!

Not only did it work, but website owners discovered a trend. While website owners could make a nice living from websites that offered articles on several different topics, in several different genres, the potential for making a living from a single website dramatically increased when they narrowed their topics and became experts—the go to place for information.

In fact, narrowing their websites to a single topic allowed them to pre-sell on levels they never imagined. As they become known as “the place to go for answers” they began to build rapport with readers which allowed them to expand their information-based websites to include niche specific consultations, seminars, workshops, products, services, and more.

Step Outside The Obvious

It’s easy to say, “I’m going to start a home business opportunity website and offer classified ads, reviews on each home business, and articles related to those home business ideas.” And you can get away with it. A few trips to a free content group will supply you with enough information to put up a one-hundred page website in one month’s time.

But if you really want to do something that makes a difference in your life and that of your readers, you need to think outside the box.

When looking for the perfect home business, for yourself, what were you looking for?
What irritated you the most about the home business websites you visited?
What inspired you the most and kept you coming back to your favorite websites?
What did you wish you could find but no matter how hard you looked, you simply couldn’t find it? And can you interview successful entrepreneurs in that field or area of expertise and develop a business website, product, and/or service to meet that need?

Define Your Niche

The first step to developing your home business opportunity website is to find a hole and fill it. Stop trying to get rich quick, stop being everything to everyone, stop advertising to the masses, and start looking for an area of specialty—something that will meet a want or need for your target audience—that you can fill.

Build Your Business

Building a successful home business opportunity website takes time, patience, and lots of hard work. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your business. Take the time to develop a business that can withstand the slow times and flourish in the fast times.

If you aren’t already an expert, become the expert through research, hands-on experience, and hiring the right people—what you don’t know can always be outsourced.

Target a specific audience or market and capitalize on it. Take an idea with a broad or general scope and narrow it down. Then redefine your idea, find a niche to call your own, and begin marketing and advertising to that select group of individuals. Avoid becoming another super-mall filled with useless information or goods that’s designed to accommodate the masses and become "the source".

A Template For Success

Let’s assume you have a passion for helping mothers work from home, but you don’t want to be another “work at home mom” website. While your goal is to target mothers, your main goal is to help them build successful home businesses that allows ample time to play with their small children or attend their older children’s extracurricular activities.

You could become another website filled with recycled information, or you could carve out a niche that targets a very specific area within a broad topic and become the expert others seek. For instance, you know work at home opportunities are everywhere and you know there’s a lot of competition, but you’ve run a successful virtual assistant business for five years. In fact, you’ve gone through some pretty rough times before your business really took off three years ago.

Your first inclination is to build a website geared towards selling information-based products designed to help women start and run a profitable virtual assistant business, handle problem clients, sweet-talk corporate clients to putting you on retainer, and hiring employees. You’d attract buyers through carefully written articles designed to pre-sell your information products. You’re even considering writing a few articles for main-stream publications.

But as time passes you realize your information-based website and products should be a by-product of something larger. So you scour the Internet looking for other virtual assistant businesses. You discover great information websites, workshops, and even a few associations, but there’s something missing. Something is lacking and that’s when it hits you!

That thing that is lacking will become the core of your business. After careful research and plenty of “confidentiality” agreements, your new business is about to open its doors.

As time progresses your website grows into a niche specific work at home opportunity website designed to educate, inform, and empower women of all ages to become the top virtual assistant office in their geographic area.

In fact, your website includes a free public area filled with articles designed to pre-sell your products and services, and a paid membership only area filled with surveys, articles, e-books, audio tapes, and virtual seminars. Your product line includes your “core product” and it becomes the driving force behind your business, but you know that a virtual assistant has special needs so your product line is eventually broadened to include everything a virtual assistant needs to succeed and nothing more; there’s recorders, transcribers, brief cases, answering machines, notepads, computers, home office furniture, office supplies, and so forth. As your business grows, you hire more help, which frees up your time to make special appearances, hold in-person workshops, and develop training seminars that will one day become franchises.

And to think, it all started because you stepped outside the obvious and found a single niche.