Mlm4wghhghhhd

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

An Introduction to Alternative Lifestyle Business Opportunities

Everyone is familiar with the traditional models for making money. There are a few options available: Either you work for somebody as an employee, or you work as a self-employer, or you run some sort of business. Each of these has their own sets of advantages and disadvantages to weigh up. But they all generally imply that you will be actively working for a number of specified hours every week, and that you get paid accordingly. You are normally confined to working from a specific location, and more often than not this is not from your home which leads to one of the headaches of modern day living: commuting.

Recent polls have shown that the trend has been shifting gradually towards a better balance between work and lifestyle over the last few decades. People dont want to spend their precious free time commuting to and from work. And then once at work they dont want to work for a boss that tells them what they have to do, and how they should dress to get it done. People want to be able to work based from home and be in charge of their own time management. They want to spend more time with their families. More and more mothers want to be able to create some sort of income by working from home whilst looking after children.

And so was born the alternative lifestyle business opportunities.

There are numerous ads out for opportunities working from home. And now that just about every household has a PC and is connected to the internet, there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to work from home on-line. And that means choosing the hours that you want to work, which frees up time that can be spent on improving your lifestyle.

Unfortunately with all of the advertised alternative lifestyle business opportunities also came a lot of scams and opportunities that will lose you money. There are the MLM (multilevel marketing) opportunities that, even though not all pyramid schemes, are still dependent on you finding more people to join the network in order for it to become profitable. You dont promote a product as such. You promote a system that benefits from you doing the head-hunting for it. And even though these MLM opportunities do reward you for your efforts, the reward is seldom proportional to the effort. But they sell the opportunity as work based from home and thereby generate the interest.

Then there are all the other advertisements that are trying to sell you opportunities that, once bought, are simply not as lucrative as they are made out to be. They promise you untold wealth for completing online surveys or doing data entry work, and they all sell themselves to you on your desire to work from home on-line to improve your lifestyle. But almost without fail you will have to pay a fee to join their scheme. Some of them even have the nerve to say that they charge a fee to separate those that are serious about the opportunities from those that are not! But once joined you will seldom find that the opportunity is as lucrative as it was made to sound originally.

The good news, however, is that there are opportunities available out there that are honest and do work. As with all other business models, they require hard work to set up but they also do provide returns. And above all, these returns are proportional to your effort. But the thing to understand is that there is no one opportunity that, once youve joined, will make you earn a reasonable living from home.

So how do you know the difference between good opportunities and money wasters?

The answer is simple. In the same way that you know whether a traditional business opportunity is a good or a bad one: you have to do proper research. You have to understand that there is no such thing as a get-rich-quick-by-working-a-few-hours-a-week-from-home scheme using the internet. You have to educate yourself in how online business models work as apposed to traditional business models. Understanding the internet as medium for business opportunities is the only way for you to be able to identify true alternative lifestyle business opportunities as they present themselves.

There is plenty of material available on the subject on the internet. And more often than not there is a price attached to these (lets be honest, you have to spend some money to make some money). But the difference here is that investing in this research offers you something in return for your money that you can utilize to start your business.

And how do you know which research material to invest in?

Again you do this by doing proper research on the material itself. Before you buy a book on home decoration, for example, you do some research on that book, dont you? You read reviews about it and follow recommendations from trusted sources. Well the same is true for reference material regarding business opportunities on the internet.

And once youre properly equipped with the knowledge, well the rest is, as they say, history.

Pete Coetzee is the webmaster for http://www.internet-business-machine.com, a site of articles, reviews and resources for online entrepreneurs and internet business resources.

mlm
interactive marketing
multi level marketing
marketing campaign
marketing career
advanced marketing
marketing analysis
marketing careers
integrated marketing
interactive marketing

Target Audience One of the Four Ps

Do you know who your target audience is? If you dont know, you are not maximizing your advertising and/or marketing efforts.

A marketing strategy blends the elements of the marketing mix, also known as the four Ps (product, price, placement, promotion). The promotion element involves communication, and one type of communication is advertising. The advertising strategy combines the elements of a creative mix. This mix includes the target audience, product concept, communications media, and the advertising message.

In order to create an effective advertising message, it is important to know who your target audience is. The target audience includes the end-user, the person who makes the purchase, and the one who influences the purchasing decision. For instance, McDonalds target audience is made up of children and their parents. The children influences their parents purchasing decision. Therefore, McDonalds advertising message is directed toward the children, as well as their parents.

The process of determining who your target audience is begins with segmenting the consumer market; finding the right niche. This process begins with identifying groups of people with certain shared characteristics within a broad market. The categories of characteristics are geographic, demographic, behavioristic, and psychographic. Then combine these groups into larger market segments according to their mutual interest in the products utility or benefit. From these segments, choose your target market. Your target audience includes your target market. The target market in the previous McDonalds example is the person(s) who makes the purchase. Target audience is larger than the target market.

Segmenting the business market is just as complex as segmenting the consumer market. Business markets are identified by using many of the same variables used to identify consumer markets. Additional variables used are business purchasing procedures, SIC Code, or by market concentration.

The product/service market consists of all types of consumers; however, groups of consumers have similar needs and wants. Begin with market research; identify your groups with shared characteristics; combine these groups into larger markets; and select your target audience which includes your target market. Before you create an effective advertising message, it is important to know who you are talking to. Do you know who your target audience is?

Rita J. Cartwright is a Virtual Assistant and owner of RJs Word Processing Services. She received a Bachelors of Science degree in Marketing from Arizona State University. More information about Rita and her company can be found at http://www.rjswordprocessing.com

Rita J. Cartwright is a Virtual Assistant and owner of RJ's Word Processing Services, and she began her business in 2002. In 1998, she received a Bachelor's of Science degree in Marketing from Arizona State University with a minor in Spanish. More information about Rita and her company can be found at http://www.rjswordprocessing.com

email marketing
web marketing
retail marketing
marketing software
mlm leads
marketing conference
mlm leads
mlm prospecting
marketing association
direct marketing association

Feb 26, 2008 Feb 27, 2008 Feb 28, 2008 Feb 29, 2008 Mar 1, 2008 Mar 2, 2008 Mar 3, 2008 Mar 4, 2008 Mar 5, 2008 Mar 6, 2008 Mar 7, 2008 Mar 8, 2008 Mar 10, 2008 Mar 11, 2008 Oct 24, 2008 Oct 25, 2008 Oct 26, 2008 Oct 27, 2008 Oct 28, 2008 Oct 29, 2008 Oct 31, 2008 Nov 16, 2008 Nov 18, 2008 Nov 20, 2008