I’ve also gotten similar things personally as well.  Been seeing more and more of them and I am sure they aren’t limited to California.  Check and double-check the validity of any of the mail that comes through fom the “government” and make sure that it is legit.

You could spend hours finding and searching for dropshippers but I recommend you spend the $47.00 and get this dropshipping program.  Pretty much gives you all the information you need and also gives you additional resources that, if you haven’t done this before, can prove invaluable.  Granted, most of the information on dropshippers can be found elsewhere, but for $47.00, it is a small price to pay when you consider how much time you would spend trying to corral all the information  yourself (plus the how to guide isn’t bad if you haven’t done this before).  Finally, don’t forget that you can list your products on ebay (without needing a website) which gives you a huge reach for your products.

Ramsay uses the lunch menu to create a culinary hook that will bring people back for the a la carte (i.e. expensive) dinner menu. His lunch menus consist of basic, honest food dished out at extremely competitive prices. His theory being if that by providing a superior lunch at good prices, imagine how good, and how good of a value, the dinner is. Hook people with the lunch, make your money with the dinner.

You can apply this idea to pretty much any business. Offer something useful at extremely good value and watch customers come back for the big ticket items.

 http://www.internetretailer.com/ 

http://www.bookmarkbliss.com/general/balls-and-brains-the-lethal-combo-of-online-business-success/

How To Reach And Stay At The Top Of The First Page Of The Search Engines
by: Olga Fogleman

Everybody is familiar with search engines such as Google & Yahoo. Search Engines have radically changed the Internet. Radically! Over 50% of all consumer purchases of all business purchases are now pursued by searches. That’s what was said months ago and it is obviously going higher. So the majority of people Worldwide who now are on computers, the first place they go to is a Search Engine to find information, for what they are looking for.

The Search Engine technology is now based and what Search Engine is trying to do as they are trying to put out in front of their searchers, the most current relative information possible. Google knows that what it can give you is exactly what you want to see and it’s relative to the current & it’s timely. And you are going to come back to Google over, over and over again.

Why all those Bloggers out there for years have been making a lot of money and how they are promoting for free, and how they getting free publicity and generating MASS traffic to their sites? Because Bloggers took advantage of what Google had determined was the secret to the Internet right now. A WEB SITE THAT CHANGES A LOT GETS MORE RATING WITH A SEARCH ENGINE. So if your website is changing a lot and adjusting a lot and is current, Google will push you up on the rating. That means you are getting closer, closer and closer to the first page. And this is extremely important, particularly if you know how to what is called “games the system.

What those Bloggers do – they “game the system”. And here is how they game the system: They went out and found the websites that have the absolute most change going on in a web site every single day, every single hour, every single minute, and every single second. They are powerful websites that have constant change, constant upgrading going on every minute of every day. Theses website are called “Article Hubs”. These web sites grow out of the whole change in how Search Engines work because people realized that the more websites change, the more powerful website are in searches, they realized there better be constant change. This is particularly true in Media sites & this is particularly true with Bloggers, because they began to figure out that if they have more constant change on their sites every day their Bloggs will lift on the searches. And I am going to show you one of those hugs sites. It is an extremely powerful site, 5000-7000 writers, authors, reporters & Bloggers place their articles in this site every day.

Do you understand that that site is not just visited by tens of thousands of writers and author’s who have submitted articles everyday? Do you realize this site is visited by over a million unique visitors every single day? So these sites, these Article Hubs are incredibly potent. And when you put one article in one of these sites, guess what you start to do? You start to dominate keywords. And if you can get on the first page of any major keyword you have hit a Gold Mine! One article! One keyword! Traffic, traffic, traffic! There is one example “Religion and online marketing”, this article was written two years ago and guess where they are.

Do you know when you put a keyword in worldwide there are over 35 millions places on the web that have this constant in here with Religion and Online Marketing? And this article is still having a first result, first page. That was written TWO YEARS AGO! He has been getting traffic every single day for almost 800 days for this article. One Article! One keyword! Traffic, Traffic, Traffic! And if you go page after page, after page you are going to see that article over and over and over … That Company continues to get traffic to this very day. That’s the power of Article Hubs.

If you are looking for a home business opportunity please check this site! With this new marketing system, even beginners are successful.
http://olga.YOURCHANCE2SUCCESS.COM

About The Author

Olga Fogleman
I came to America from Russia 7 years ago.
I have a great family: my lovely husband who is helping me on my projects and my son, who is a student at the University of Florida now.
I am an accountant with a Bachelor Degree and many years of experience.
I am also a successful eBay seller and Internet marketer so I quit my 9-5 job and I am enjoying my life now.

The goal for you is not to make money from your blog, but to use your blog as the conduit to your retail site/s.

How To Find Hot Niche Markets
by: Dan Farrell

Working out what your niche market will be to start your home business is something that can elicit much excitement. This is when you can put all those great ideas you have had for your business into a plan of action. Give yourself a number of options to work over. Some will be great and some won’t fit. Get more than one so you always have a back up when you start a home business.

Look to 3 sources for ideas:

* A hobby you love: You won’t find many hobbies from which you can’t build a business. And since you enjoy doing it, it won’t be tedious to “go to work” every day. When you pick something for your business that you sincerely like, you will have fun at doing it.

* Your experiences: In life we go though many experiences and you can use these to build a business. For example if you have raised children you can then put all your parenting experience together and start a business related to parenting.

* Your talents: Everyone has one or more talents within them. Dig down and see what yours are. You can start a freelance business using your talents.

Defining your niche market:

1. List out some ideas then put them in the order of what you like the best.

2. Go to the site listed here and put a key word into the overture suggestion tool box: This will bring up the amount of searches that have been done for your keyword and will represent demand.

3. If you search out that same key word on Google search engine http://google.com then you will see websites supplying that item and you will know how many competitors are out there that will be competing with you when you start a home business.

4. If you find a topic that is demanded in quantity but low in the suppliers, you will then make money. This should be your special market for which you do your niche marketing. You will make more money with a niche market as you will reduce and sometimes even eliminate competition. Go through your list of ideas until you narrow it down to about

5. Then go through them again and see which one will fit into a niche market.

Establishing your USP:

Once you have found the concept that fits into a specialized or niche market it is time to establish your USP, Unique, Selling, Point. This is when you will take your idea, and see how you will make your business uniquely different from your competitors. Often neglected, finding the USP is something that new business owners need to do to set their item above the competition. Online businesses are very competitive and you have to stay ahead of the game.

There are two reasons you need to set yourself up as different from others:

1. Get ahead of your competitors

2. To clearly define to your potential customers why your product and service is better than your competitors.

Deciding on your business model:

Part of your business concept will not only be consolidating your ideas but also choosing your business model. There are a few that you can choose from:

* Affiliate marketing-Getting involved with affiliate programs will target your efforts

* Network marketing (MLM)- again this will target your market and idea.

* Marketing-taking the product and selling it

* Service- you should use your talents, which includes freelancing.

You can see there are a number of things you will have to do to get your business concept into operation. But it’s worth it to plan and take care in developing it. It will be your foundation, after all.

About The Author

Dan Farrell has a newsletter, Build An eBusiness On A Shoestring. To sign up with free bonuses, go to: Niche Market Ideas (http://build-an-ebusiness-on-a-shoestring.com)

Traffic Series - Part 1 - Blogging As A Means Of Traffic
by: Glen Barnhardt

In this Traffic Series I will be talking about different methods to use to drive traffic to your list. Today we will talk about how to use blogging to bring traffic to your site.

First thing you will need to do is setup a blog. To go thorough all of the steps to setup a blog is beyond the scope of this article. There are two ways you can go one would be to use a service like blogger where you can have your blog setup in minutes and be blogging. The second would be to install a blog yourself on your own domain. The latter has much more benefits but requires you to have some technical abilities. If you are not technical and wish to have your own blog on your own domain consider outsourching to get it done. There are lots of places like that you can hire a professional to install your blog. To name a couple elance.com freelance.com.

The nice thing about blogs is that people are members of blogging communities and these people will see your articles and come to your site. Instant traffic. Now for you to get hooked up to these blogging communities can be automatic or you may need to submit your site. Pingomatic.com is a great source to get your blog sent to many of the biggest communities.

Blogging software like wordpress already has this built in.

To get good quality traffic you need to post to your blog frequently. Stay away from using automated software to ad content to your blog. It is always best to have unique qualtiy content. If your not a writer consider outsourcing for your articles. You can get articles done for around $4 to $5 dollars each. Don’t pay any less than that or your articles will not be of a good enough quality.

Now most important add a place for people to signup for your list. Having something to give away for free is a good way to get more signups. Unlike the squeeze page method this requires you to have something of benefit to give your customers. Your good content and any quality item you have to give them will ensure a higher rate of signups.

Make sure your signup form is above the fold. Above the fold means it’s viewable without scrolling down.

Once you have your blog up and you have posted lots of good content you can then begin to use other ways to drive traffic to your blog and get even more traffic.

In part two of our traffic series we will talk about article marketing.

About The Author
Glen Barnhardt is owner of List Advice Blog

You can get a free copy of his List Advice Report.
http://www.listadvice.com

Advertising Is Key To Home Business Success
by: Earl Williams

There is no question that advertising is key to the success of any business – large or small, new or old. Without advertising and marketing practices a business simply cannot succeed or last long. To ensure long and lasting success, a business must engage in marketing and advertising in some way. If you have heard the old adage that “it takes money to make money” then you know that advertising does not come for free. A business must consider an advertising campaign budget to keep their numbers up.

It has been said that the best form of advertising is word of mouth advertising. Word of mouth advertising is free and lends an air of credibility to the business. Usually, word of mouth advertising comes from happy and satisfied customers and clients that wish to share their positive experience. Most of the time, they tell their friends, family, and coworkers about a particular product or service and in turn new customers come to the business.

While word of mouth is a wonderful and free way to get the word out about a business, it is not the “be all end all” of advertising. Advertising with television spots, radio spots, on billboards, and in print are all still very effective ways to get the word out. These methods of advertising are quite expensive and not as realistic for many small businesses.

A more economical yet effective way for a business to advertise is online. The Internet is such an integral part of daily life now that it is hard not to advertise on the World Wide Web. The ways in which a business can advertise online are seemingly endless. There are several types of email marketing campaigns, banner advertising, link advertising, websites, and viral marketing. Usually, to engage in a successful email marketing campaign, a business will send past customers an email to announce new products or specials on their website or in their store.

By large, advertising online is usually very cheap. The key is to find a place online where lots of your customers are going to go. In order to do this, you have to be sure that you know who your demographic is and who is using your business. This might require some work on your part. Once you have identified who the people are that are using your business, you can go to other sites that these people are also going to be using, and you can advertise on these sites, quite easily.

Many business owners engage in strategic networking with other business owners in an effort to advertise their businesses. Strategic networking is a way for business owners to meet each other, get the word out about their company, and even to expand their resources and business prospects.

One of the newest ways to get the word out about your business and successfully advertise is that through social networking. Social networking is much like strategic networking in that it is usually free and occurs through meeting and discussing issues and products. However, social networking is done through modern media such as websites, blogs, and the Internet community. It is highly effective and inexpensive.

Regardless of the method of advertising used, a business must use constant advertising campaigns to keep success on the horizon.

About The Author

Earl Williams will show you how to build an online business from your own home. He will give you a verity of business to choose from. You can learn more by visiting: http://www.netmarketer.org

For 90% of situations, you are going to want to show your product on a white background. Getting that white background is not as easy as it seems nor is lighting your product correctly. It gets infinitely harder when you don’t have the right equipment. However, hiring someone, unless you know them, may not be in your best interest as the cost can be prohibitive and you’ll have to hire them again if you add products. Therefore, I recommned investing in some decent photo gear (if you don’t already have it), and some lighting equipment (it will be a tax write off after all and even if the business goes nowhere, you can always recoup some of your outlay by selling some of your equipment).

Here’s what I suggest you invest in for your home product light kit. There are two options, but I would go with number one unless you already have some photo experience. Forget number 2 if you have larger products.

1. Alien Bees B400 Flash head ($225)
2. Alien Bees Foldable Large Softbox ($150)
3. 3 c-stands ($300.00) - order these from Calumet (you may only need one)
4. Boom Arm ($100)
5. 1 Set of Pocket Wizards ($360)
6. 2 Flash units (no need for too much expense here buy you do need them to have adjustable power, a slave feature and a pc jack - $2-300)
7. 2 small lightstands ($120.00 - this varies depending on what you get but I recommend these).
8. White Seamless Paper ($30-60 depending on width).
9. Clamps and other accessories ($100.00)

That is about $1500.

You can substitute a 3rd flash in place of the #1, and you can use a smaller softbox in place of #2. That will save you a little bit. If you have a place to mount the seamless, you can cut down on 2, or even all of, the c-stands and the cost easily starts to get closer to $700-$800. Bear in mind though that while these “compromises” will work, you will need to be more creative and knowledgeble about what you are doing. Also, you start to run into limitations with how big of a product you can photograph. While I currently use the three flash set-up myself, I would prefer to have the larger light source that could be provided by a monolight, it just gives more flexibility when needed and the larger light source will make things easier even when the monolights power is not required.

Images are very powerful sales tools. The better and more professional yours are, the better your site will be perceived.