Does Financial Success or An Online Home Based Business Require an MBA?Several months ago I started my online home based business. I was brought up at a time and in a family where education was a given. My father was a successful lawyer so my mother never had to work. It was a given that when I completed my private school education which my father worked hard to provide for me, that I would attend college.In my world at that time there was no other conceivable possibility. You graduated high school and then you went to college – Period. So I did. The first year was a miserable failure and I left after it and began my working career. I would ultimately go back to college and finally get a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science, while I worked.So here I am, over thirty years after high school, having worked all those years. The most money I ever made on a job was a salary of $52,000 per year. The last company I worked for, I rose from Controller to the underpaid President and the company shut down. Now I am one of the millions of unemployed Americans.I, like many millions of people, looked for an opportunity to create an online home based business. I have been at it for a few months. My success is growing. I picked internet marketing and network marketing because I enjoyed blogging in my last job. I also had been spending time studying internet marketing on my own. Today I belong to a couple of network marketing organizations and have my own blog, which I post to almost every day.I have become an entrepreneur, and like many online home based business entrepreneurs, I am driven and committed to success. But success does not come easy in the online home based business arena. My primary products are the network marketing programs to which I belong. They provide the opportunity to achieve financial success by following a specific program of internet marketing and entrepreneurial education, and marketing the programs to others looking for a business opportunity.Network marketing has been around for a long time and despite its negative reputation, it is a viable business model that can lead to tremendous financial rewards. I have seen, and personally know a number of people that have achieved amazing success in an online home based business of network marketing. Many did achieve this incredible level of success through hard work, but without a college degree.There are many things you need to learn to become successful at internet marketing or network marketing as an online home based business. But you don’t have to go to an Ivy League college and spend five or six years and $200,000 to learn what you need to know. You don’t need an MBA or even a bachelor’s degree to be a success in network marketing.You can learn how to make an amazing living by joining these network marketing companies at a fraction of the cost of a college education. Now there are millions of people looking right now for a business opportunity like an online home based business. To achieve success in network marketing, like any other business, requires an investment.Just like college is an investment in yourself that you or your parents pay for, joining a network marketing program is an investment in yourself for which you must pay. There are no free lunches. Starting an online home based business requires and investment of time and money. It is that simple.But when you compare the value of the investment you make in a network marketing company that provides you with the system, tools and education that allows you to create unlimited success and wealth, with the value of a college education, you might be surprised.If you are an entrepreneur or want to be an entrepreneur with your own online home based business, you need to have the skill set and mind set of an entrepreneur. I suppose you can get most of it going through college and graduate school, spending years and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or you can cut to the chase, so to speak, and get the education, skill set, and mind set much quicker and for a lot less money. And while you are learning and developing you are making money.This is the reality of our world today. This is the reality of the knowledge based worker era. You get to choose your path in life and you have to live with the results. No way around it, success requires work. But the path you choose is up to you. One way or another if you want to achieve financial success today, you need to invest in yourself. If you don’t you limit your opportunities in life.You can invest in a college degree and hope that you are able to find a job. You can work for somebody else your whole life and watch all the benefits go to the owner. Or you can invest in yourself and join a network marketing program with unlimited earning potential and the satisfaction of owning your own online home based business.

Many online marketers, both new and experienced, have used ppc advertising to advertise their website businesses.

PPC advertising; also known as pay per click advertising or ppc search marketing, has the potential to bring INSTANT traffic to your website.

Additionally, if you only wanted to advertise your brand online, then ppc advertising can allow you to publicize your brand or promote your business name on the Internet, often at little or no cost.

Many a time, however, internet marketing practitioners will encounter problems with their search marketing or ppc advertising campaigns.

An online marketer like you and I could potentially spend large amounts of money on ppc advertising, but yet not make any sales or generate targeted online leads. Some of us may remember watching the number of clicks and our ppc advertising costs rising continually but without having made any sales or acquired many email leads.

What could be worse is that you could end up getting jaded or disillusioned with ppc advertising methods and stop using them completely.

Certainly, setting up an effective ppc advertising campaign may well require a fair amount of time and effort, sometimes over multiple attempts of trial and error.

If you have tried ppc advertising, then you can probably remember all the keyword research, the webpages, tracking codes, keyword tracking systems, website analytics that you had to prepare and monitor?

As an online business owner doing your own website marketing, you would probably want the biggest website advertising “bang” for your buck.

Now, enter the free website advertising methods and techniques, which are also options that you can consider as alternatives to ppc advertising.

Naturally, if you wanted to replace ppc advertising with free website advertising, you will need to learn how to apply online advertising and Internet marketing techniques like:

1) article marketing

2) marketing with online videos

3) using your own website blogs as a form of free website advertising

4) applying web 2.0 website advertising techniques to drive traffic to your website

Also, let’s not forget that you have the choice of doing forum posts, blog comments, and joint venture marketing, all of which can be very effective as methods of free website advertising.

Given the many choices for advertising your website for free, should you then choose to replace your existing ppc advertising with free website advertising?

Perhaps, one possible approach is this — If you are not getting the ppc advertising results you want, then you can continue to learn the methods of ppc advertising, refine your techniques, and improve your pay per click advertising skills.

Meanwhile, it would certainly be a good idea for you to start learning and applying one or two other techniques in free website advertising.

The additional effort that you put into free website advertising will actually complement or supplement your existing ppc advertising efforts.

In other words, you can increase website traffic using free methods to advertise your website while you continue to market with and learn about ppc advertising.

Suppose you are doing pretty well and making a profit with ppc advertising. If this is the case, great job!

Why not also apply some of the many techniques that are available to you for getting free traffic to your website.

At the end of the day, a good internet marketing strategy to adopt might be to have several effective and consistent website traffic streams that will send visitors to your site.

Traffic to your websites could and should come from both free and paid website advertising sources. This approach ensures recurrent traffic to your website from a variety of advertising media and methods and will allow you to stay profitable while you make money online.

Tony C is a student and practitioner of Online and Internet Marketing and regularly uses both free website traffic and paid website traffic generation techniques to market online.

OK – so only about 2500 people in the world can pronounce the name of the volcano that had the entire globe at a near-standstill for travel in the skies. If you had been among those stranded how would your home based small business have fared?Let’s say you’re on a business trip, you’ve got a sitter with the kids at home, you’ve taken your mate with you and you’re supposed to be home Saturday. That leaves Sunday to recuperate and Monday to start a very busy at home based business week. Instead, along comes Eyjafjallajokull, spewing ash into the skies covering half of Europe and grounding planes all over the world for days.All of a sudden you’re faced with spending an extra 5 days waiting for dust to settle. No way you’ll be home before Thursday. So you faced with additional expenses:
five days more lodging,
five days more food,
five days more transportation — unless you’d rather wait those five days on a cot with 10,000 of your closest friends with zero privacy, zero quiet, and almost zero cleanliness.Add to that the cost of the sitter for your kids — assuming you could find someone who could have stayed with them longer.The point is, if you have a JOB — it would be tough. But if you have set up a system to earn extra money from home to go with that job, these unforeseen added expenses would be much easier to stomach.But if you’ve created the life-style you desire with a top home based business, chances are, your work from home company would be just fine without you for a few days. If you’ve set up multiple streams of cash, like we teach, you’ll still be making enough money to support the extra expenses. And the kids? Well, we imagine you’ve got a great support system that can help take care of them in your absence.And any good top home based business is set up with Skype so you can check in “real time” to let the kids know when you’ll be home.One of the biggest benefits of having an at home based business, that you’ve set up well, is that it will weather most storms — even the occasional volcano.By the way, its pronounced: AY-yah-fyah-lah-YOH-kutl. Can I buy a vowel?