The majority of home based businesses will fail. So how do you make sure your home internet business is a success, in the face of so much failure?
Perhaps the most important factor in determining whether your business will thrive or fail is your ability to avoid the many pitfalls to which online business owners often succumb.
In order to help you know what to avoid, I have compiled this list of the top ten mistakes made by home based internet business owners. Hopefully, the list will provide you with some food for thought as you establish and operate your home based business.
1. Falling for Get Rich Quick Schemes
There are simply countless of these schemes out there. Any Google search for "home business" or "internet business" will turn up a bunch of these scams.
But most of these schemes only make money for the people that originate them. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. There is good money to be made online, but it takes time, commitment, knowledge, and dedication.
2. Succumbing to Internet Information Overload
The internet is a wonderful source of free and abundant information. When starting your web business, it is easy to get so caught up in researching your business and never actually get started on building your business.
Surfing the Internet can be addictive, and while it is important to do research into both internet marketing in general and your niche in specific, you must at some point stop researching and start building your business.
3. Not Doing Proper Keyword Research
Doing adequate keyword research is one of the bedrocks of any successful home internet business. You should know both the demand for a keyword and the level of difficulty in achieving top search engine rankings for that keyword.
Many people charge ahead with building their sites without doing enough keyword research, and then they are surprised when they get no traffic, either because nobody is searching for those keyword terms or because the competition for these keywords is simply too stiff.
4. Picking the Wrong Niche
When you select a niche for your home based business, make sure it is one in which you have enough interest and in which other people have enough interest too. This gets back to keyword research, which is the best way to assess demand for your niche in the online community.
5. Obsessing Over Pagerank
Pagerank is one of the most over-hyped and overexposed elements of SEO. It is simply Google's attempt to lend a numeric value (from 1 to 10) to the overall quality and quantity of a web page's backlinks.
There are many other factors that go into determining a site's search engine rankings, not the least of which is the level of trust attributed to those sites linking to yours, also known in SEO circles as "Trustrank".
Nonetheless, many people spend far too much time worrying about their Pagerank and concentrating on boosting it. A much better use of time is to focus on getting links from relevant authority sites in your field.
6. Lacking Passion for Your Niche Business
The importance of passion in determining the ultimate success or failure cannot be overstated. While it is by no means the only factor in determining a site's success -- you need knowledge and marketplace demand too - it might well be the single most vital ingredient.
If you truly love your business' topic, you will be far more likely to work on it, and your passion will show in your site's web pages.
7. Going Up Against Too Many Authority Sites
In picking a niche, it is vital to make sure that your site will not be competing against too many "authority" sites in the search engine rankings. These are sites that generally have thousands of backlinks, a high Pagerank (often 6 or more), and quite frequently, they date back to the late 1990's.
If you see that more than one or two such sites are showing up regularly in the search results for the main keywords in your niche, it might be time to consider either reconceiving your approach to the niche or switching niches altogether.
8. Failing to Understand SEO
Far too many small web site owners simply fail to comprehend how search engine optimization (SEO) works. Without current and comprehensive knowledge of the methods and techniques that can be used to elevate your site's position in the search engine results, you will be at a major disadvantage.
There are many wonderful, free resources online covering the methodology of link building and the proper manipulation of on-page factors, which together make up the core of any SEO campaign. If you do yourself a favor and educate yourself on SEO, your site's traffic can increase dramatically, as can your business revenue.
9. Losing Interest in Your Business
Quite frequently, this is the direct result of a lack of passion for your niche. Many people simply get bored with their web based businesses after spending many hours and months working on them, only to let them stagnate or abandon them altogether.
If you are passionate about your business, you are far more likely to continue to invest time in building it, even when you hit lulls or when your site traffic drops. Be persistent -- it pays off in the end.
10. Building Poor Quality Content
Anyone who has browsed the web knows there is a ton of bad content our there. Many webmasters seem obsessed with pumping out more and more pages without any concern as to the quality of the content on those pages.
While this strategy might work for a while, especially for people who create a huge volume of material, more often than not, it is a recipe for failure. Poor quality content will lead to people leaving your site quickly, and this in turn will hurt your search rankings and kill prospects for repeat traffic. It's also a bit soul-sapping -- it's hard to be enthusiastic about a site you know is pure rubbish.
Build content you are proud of. This will help build your readership, and it will help improve the web in general. And in the end, it's just good business. After all, the search engines ideally want to return quality sites in their results. Your best long term strategy is to give them what they want, and in turn, they will be more likely to show you love (and send you lots of traffic) down the line.
