If you have not tried growing your home based business yet through Squidoo, you don’t know what you are missing. Squidoo.com is one of the newer social networking sites modeled after MySpace and Facebook but unlike those two it encourages the marketing of products and services. Advertising of websites is not only permitted but it is encouraged.

Right now on Squidoo you can find hundreds of different articles on hundreds of different subjects. The material is grouped by category helping the Squidoo follower get right to whatever they are looking for. The categories include; books, travel, music, business, health and medicine, tv and movies, shopping and many more. Say for example you want to plan a road trip. Squidoo has an article on how to do that which includes links to possible destinations, attractions and places to stay. See how easy it can be to generate possible leads for your company.

The key to using Squidoo is to create a lens which will be used by Squido followers to be directed to your product or service. The first step is to sign up for a free account. It is a good idea before setting up your lens to check out some of the others on Squidoo. When you are ready to set up your own lens, click on the Make A Lens box and begin. First, you will be asked what you want to do with your lens. Next, you will fill in the URL for your website and pick a category that you would like your lens to fall under. Add some key search words for your lens and fill out your profile.

Squidoo calls the pages lenses because each is to focus on something that is important to the creator. They estimate a half million people visit the site each day, all potential buyers of your product or service. Once you start your lens, you are asked to fill out the first module which is an introduction to you and your subject. You then have the option to set up a guestbook for visitors and a section to link to similar sites. Squidoo even gives you a money making option where you can recommend other products that may tie in with yours and for every purchase that is made you can pick up a commission. The final step to creating your Squidoo lens is to click on the publish button and get started letting the website go to work for you.

When you own a home based business or are in any Network Marketing business a great skill to develop is learning a bit about HTML. The reason for this is because it allows you to get creative and produce some killer advertising for yourself. In today’s blog I’ll be showing you the steps to create an image that is clickable and will take someone directly to your website. There are so many cool ways to market your business, but one of my favorite right now is placing free classified ads on Backpage.com.

The steps below will show you how to create a clickable image for classified ads, or any other service you are using to post an html image for your network marketing business:

1. Create the image and save it as a .jpeg file. You can use a number of programs to do this ranging from a very basic program like Windows Paint or more advanced program like Adobe Photoshop.
2. Take your image and upload it to a service like photobucket.com or flickr.com.
3. Once the image is loaded to the website and you’ve named the image, I recommend adding tags to it. This helps the image to rank in google rankings, something you definitely want. You want to chose keywords that are relevant to the image, so if you are doing a classified ad about starting a home business, you would want to use keywords like “starting a home business”, “work from home”, “home based business”, etc.
4. The next step depends on your service, but since I use photobucket.com I’ll be explaining the steps taken for this website. At this point you want to get the HTML code for the image. In photobucket you can either hover over the image itself or click on the image you want to you. There are several different selections you can make here, so make sure you are copying the HTML code only.  This is what it should look like:  <a href=”http://s409.photobucket.com/albums/pp176/napavllyphoyo/?action=view&current=Ad011copy.jpg” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i409.photobucket.com/albums/pp176/napavllyphoyo/Ad011copy.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”mlm leads,how to start an online business,home business,grow your home business”></a>.
5. Take your HTML code you got for the image and paste it into a notepad document. Make sure that Word Wrap is not checked.
6. You now want to change to target section of the code. This is the part of the html code that will direct the person that has clicked on your image to your website. As the code is now it will send them to your photobucket account. You want to change the part of the code between the first set of quotation marks to your website address: “http://s409.photobucket.com/albums/pp176/napavllyphoyo/?action=view&current=Ad011copy.jpg”, and change it to look like this: “http://www.CarinDavis.net“. The final code will look something like this: <a href=”CarinDavis.net” target=”_blank”><img        src=”http://i409.photobucket.com/albums/pp176/napavllyphoyo/Ad011copy.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”mlm leads,how to start an online business,home business,grow your home business”></a>.

You can now take this code and place it anywhere that accepts HTML. Remember to have fun and get creative. It’s all about standing out and showing your personality. If you need any one on one help with this you can contact me at davis.carin@gmail.com.

Most people are pressed for time and looking for ways to leverage what little time they have.  The second most popular reason for not building a business, behind having no money, is no available time.

This comes from a lack of understanding that there are alternatives to always spending your PERSONAL time to generate leads for your business.  If you’re someone who works a regular full time job, which these days is 40-50 hours per week, it becomes very difficult to muster the mental and physical strength to tack on another 20-30 hours just to try and build a successful company on a part time bases.  When will you sleep?  Eat?  Spend time with the family?  Relax???

Lead generation is the lifeblood of your business, so you must take it seriously.  So, here’s a few things you can do to free up some time in your lead generation efforts.

1. Build a capture page website – the sole purpose of this type of website is to capture leads for you that have an interest in connecting with you for your business.  If done correctly, this website tool will sort and categorize each lead for you, eliminating the need to manually sort or track where they come from.
2. Obtain an auto-responder service – If you plan on keeping in contact with your leads on a regular basis, this tool is invaluable.  It takes the guesswork out of trying to figure out when to send your communications.  You simply pre-write your contacts, set up an interval, and that’s it.  You never miss an introduction, follow up, or follow through communication.  Consider Aweber or GetResponse to do the job.
3. Hire a virtual assistant – this is a great way to sift through tire kickers and non-qualified prospects by having someone else do the “dirty work” for you.  Simply provide a checklist of qualifying questions with minimum requirements to the assistant, and instruct them to only pass to you people who are seriously interested in doing business.
4. Create content that can be leveraged – By submitting quality content to targeted online resources in multiple places (i.e. video hosting sites, directories, article submission services) you increase the visibility of your expertise by positioning it in front of a constant flow of new traffic without having to re-submit new material.  The article or video may be a month old, but to the person who has just discovered it; it’s all brand new information.

The average investment of time to successfully promote a business on a part-time basis can be done effectively on about 8-15 hours per week of consistent effort.

This leaves plenty of room for enjoying life without being chained to the business.  Many of the top income earners in MLM/Network Marketing utilize these strategies on a regular basis because it permits them to speak to a large number of people, all pre-qualified, and usually ready to transact without doing all the grunt work themselves.

Leveraging your time and money is just smart business, if you ask me.  So, find ways to delegate the drudgery of your business to systems and processes as often as possible.

If you’ve ever thought about or already posting ads to backpage.com you need to check out this posting software. If you haven’t heard of backpage.com, it’s a classified ad website very much like craigslist except with fewer restrictions and the ability to use automatic posting software. Posting on backpage with the ad poster will shave off many hours of submitting classifieds, where you would normally have had to submit each ad individually. Check out the video above and email me at davis.carin@gmail.com for more information. There will be a follow up video on how to get the urls for the software and I will be posting it on my youtube.com page.