Starting an online business from home is a growing trend. More and more people are flocking to the Internet to find ways to start a business from the comfort of their own homes. Of course starting an online business from home also has the added advantage of minimum overheads too, so I’m sure that helps!

Due to the current economic climate there is also sometimes an air of desperation surrounding people who are trying to make their Internet business succeed and earn some much-needed extra cash. Now, some people will have a fairly smooth ride from nothing to online success, but others will get stung along the way. You see, with desperation comes mistakes.

Here are my top three pitfalls to avoid when starting an online business from home.

Starting an online business from home – Snare 1 – Scams. I don’t care who you are, if you are feeling pretty desperate in your attempts to build a business based on the Internet, then you are a prime target for scams. Don’t let your need for wanting to succeed online affect your judgement when faced with supposed business opportunities. A decent rule of thumb is the old cliché, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Try to avoid any product or service promising too much in return for too little, especially if they seem over-hyped and ‘pushy’. I think you just need to be aware that scams do exist so do your research before investing any of your hard-earned or hard saved money. A good idea is to use forums so you can ask real people what their real experiences are with certain products or services.

Starting an online business from home – Snare 2 – The next shiny object syndrome. This is when you decide to invest your money into a product or service to help you in starting an online business from home, then quickly see something else that takes your eye. Obviously you don’t want to miss out on a big opportunity, so you invest in that one too and start work on it. Maybe a few days or weeks later you stumble upon another great looking opportunity, so again, not wanting to miss out, you invest in that product or service and start working on that. This process gets repeated until you either run out of money, or decide that nothing works and Internet business is all useless.

The process described above happens to a lot of people, so if it sounds like you don’t worry because it is easily fixable. Just pick one thing to focus on and see it the whole way through. Un-subscribe from all distracting email lists. Looking into getting an Internet Marketing Coach or Mentor will also ensure you stick to your word and stay on track.

Starting an online business from home – Snare 3 – The get rich quick mentality. When first looking into starting an online business from home you are going to see a lot of sales pages and sales videos, good ones too. A lot of them do a good job in convincing you that if you decide to get involved in Internet Marketing and start an online business, then you will make a lot of money very quickly. The more of them you see the more you believe that in some weird way you are actually entitled to make a lot of money very quickly, and that’s how they get you.

Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t try to be successful quickly, go for it. But what these kind of get rich quick mentalities can breed, is a lot of irrational impatience towards your new business. For example, if you are not earning 10k a month after two or three months of starting up, then the business is no good and you need to look for something else that will. How crazy does that sound?

My biggest tip to help you avoid these snares and become a success online is actually something that I have already mentioned. Finding a quality Internet Marketing Coach or Mentor can keep you grounded, focused and working hard on the tasks that will make your online business a success. If there is one thing I have learned in business and in life over the last 7 years, is no matter what you are trying to achieve, there will be somebody out there who has already done it. But more importantly they can show you how to do it in half the time, so starting an online business from home becomes a very achievable (and lucrative) goal.

There is only one thing that keeps any industry and type of business alive, and that is return on investment or more popularly shortened into ROI. All companies are built and are operated to achieve that one goal, all the more if you are running an online business or if your company greatly relies on your online presence, positive ROI is what you need.

Getting returns on your investment is very important when it comes to having a successful business both online and offline, but from an e-commerce point of view, having a positive ROI is crucial when it comes to building and keeping client satisfaction. While the immediate concerns of an SEO (search engine optimization) company is to get as much online traffic as it can, the ultimate goal of the business is still to make significant ROI.

SEO companies are known to be after highly targeted traffic using different methods such as rankings, social media, viral marketing, and traditional content marketing and so on. While getting lots of traffic is great for a website or an online business, it is not enough – the website should be able to convert its incoming traffic into sales in order to sustain the business.

That leads us to the eternal question – how do you convert your website traffic to actual sales? Well there are several ways to do that depending on the kind of website that you are running and the type of niche that you are in.

Here are some of the widely used means of converting web traffic into sales that have been used by dozens of successful online marketers and online business owners all over the world. Read through each one and see how you can use them to help your web traffic finally translate into tangible income.

• Have a well designed and well laid out website.
• If the bread and butter of your business is the sales that you generate online, then you better make sure that your website is properly groomed to do its job. Do you really think people will buy and trust products from websites that look half-heartedly done?
• Always use a compelling call to action.

One common reason why a lot of websites find it hard to convert their traffic into actual sales is that their call to action is not compelling enough to oblige their visitors to buy whatever they are promoting. Find a strategic location for your call to action and make sure that it makes your offer impossible to refuse.

• Make your website as “sticky” as possible.

If you get a thousand visitors a day with 980 of them leaving your site within minutes, you will never get any sales. Improve the “stickiness” of your website by getting your visitors involved and more attached to your website.