http://www.google.com Do not be afraid of competition, but do expect to work harder if you want to make money working at home in a competitive field.

You don't need a lot of of tools to start making money working at home. In my case I use a laptop with high speed internet access, an email account, a second phone line separate from my personal line, a printer, and efax to receive faxes.

You could get by with just a good internet connection and a decent email provider to start. Don't use a free email account like hotmail or yahoo. Be professional!

I learned how to build simple websites for my products, how to advertise products both online and offline, and how to use my telephone for follow-up.

This took a while and I have found that joining a good affiliate program can provide you with products, training material, marketing tools, websites and more to help you get your make money at home business off ground as you are learning.

There is no doubt biggest obstacle you will encounter is finding prospects, customers, traffic, or whatever you want to call it.

This is number one reason people fail working from home. You have a great product or service, now how do you tell world about it!!

My advice is to zero in on a main marketing strategy and then branch off from that. I'll give you an example. When I started my small business website design company I decided that signing up affiliates in various large metro areas and providing them with a pre-written telemarketing script and objections/rebuttals list was best way to attract customers inexpensively.

Pay them a handsome commission and residual income and support them with an excellent product and back-end service. I branched out into internet marketing and advertising from there. There is always more than one way to skin a cat, but focus on one method before you add another. Do not become a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none when it comes to marketing your business.

I would close this article by saying this. You have to become a sponge and spend some time and money learning how to make money working at home. Subscribe to as many newsletters, publications, etc. as your time allows you to read. BUT....Do Not Get caught up in trap of learning, but not earning.

Take what you are learning and get in game. Knowledge without action is a waste. If you will apply what you learn you will reap rewards of rapidly growing number of people who are happily making money working from home!

Now do same for first 2-3 pages of search results. Repeat for other search engines such as Yahoo and repeat using different keywords. You will wait anywhere from an hour to a few weeks to hear back from people, you may not hear back at all. But more links you get on your site better your search ranking will be.

You are going to want to put links on separate pages from your home page and put no more than 99 on a page. Doing this for 2 hours a day for 2-3 months will get you high on search engines and a LOT of traffic.

Traffic Exchanges Many people don’t like traffic exchanges because traffic directed to your site is not targeted. You may receive 1,000 visitors or more before getting even 1 sign-up or purchase, but if you don’t want to spend money, traffic exchanges won’t hurt.

A traffic exchange is giving you traffic in return for visiting other sites. You will only have to visit these sites for 10-30 seconds. The more you use, more traffic you will get. Here are some traffic sites to use:

CashClicking LoadShark BionicHits nomorehits FastFreeway Raging Bull Traffic FunnyFarmTraffic TrafficG Webmasterquest TrafficSwarm

Classified and Free Ad Sites Whether you are selling a product or promoting a business opportunity, free ad sites are great tools. You can download AdWizard for free. It will help you keep track of your ads as well as provide you will free ad sites.

Using these simple strategies will help make your business grow. I won’t lie, it will take time, but what good business didn’t take time to grow?

Copyright© Kristen Pearce