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.

10. 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.

9. 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.

8. 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.

7. 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.

6. 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.

5. 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.

4. 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.

3. 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.

2. 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.

1. 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.

WHAT IS A PENNY AUCTION?

Penny auctions have exploded in popularity with the massive growth of the internet. However, few people know the true origins of penny auctions.Beginnings actually stretch back to the Great Depression. Those were hard times for everyone, but even harder for farmers. Farmers struggled to bring in steady income because of droughts and crops not selling as well as they had previously. As a result, the banks would foreclose on the farmers who couldn’t keep up with their mortgage payments.

The banks weren’t satisfied with just repossessing the house, they wanted to raise as much capital as possible, so they resorted to selling off the possessions of the owners of the repossessed houses. There was not much the farmers could do about it so they began bidding ridiculously low prices, pennies, on the items while threatening others who dared to bid higher than a few pennies.

The auctions of today hardly resemble their tremulous beginnings. Being part of a penny auction today is exhilarating, fun, and addictive. It combines the selling format of auctioning with a little bit of chance factored in.Auctions are a game of strategy but also a game of luck.

The premise behind penny auctions is giving people the chance to win an item at a drastically reduced price.Auctions make that possible by spreading out the cost of the product among multiple bidders. In order for a person to take part in an auction, they must pay a set price for each bid. For example, if a person wanted to bid on a fifty dollar Amazon gift card then he would spend a dollar for each time a bid placed. If he ended up winning the gift card, then he would only have spent a few dollars for a fifty dollar gift card. Usually penny auctions sell bids in packages.

HOW PENNY AUCTIONS WORK!

The main foundation of penny auctions is the pay-per-bid format. It is the key that allows bidders to win items at the fraction of their retail value and allows the auction owners to keep their site profitable. Most y auction sites run on the same premise: people pay a set amount for each bid, whenever a person places a bid within the closing seconds of the auction time will be added, the last person left with a unique bid after the clocks runs out will win the item. There are a large variety of items that can be won, but they tend to be popular electronics or gift cards to popular stores.

There are two types of auctions: lowest unique bid auction and highest unique bid auction. Lowest unique auction sounds confusing but it is actually quite simple. A unique bid is when only one person has a bid at a certain price. Bids usually start at one penny, a bidder can then place a bid at two pennies. Until another bidder places a higher bid, the most recent bidder will be the lowest unique bid because that was the only bid at two cents and nobody bid higher. However, penny auctions generally don’t stop at one penny. It is not uncommon to find auctions that end up at a couple hundred dollars based on the popularity of the item being auctioned. However, the same principles apply for those auctions. Highest unique bid auctions follow the more traditional auction format such as eBay. The person with the highest bid at the end of the auction wins the item.

Auction site owners turn a profit by selling bids. Say twenty people are bidding on a ten dollar gift card at one dollar per bid, at the end of the auction if there were twenty bids placed in total then the site owner would have made twenty dollars with a ten dollar profit.Auctions do seem like a win-win situation:The site owner makes money while the bidder gets an item for dirt cheap. However, not everyone wins in penny auctions. The people who paid one dollar each bid but left with nothing to show for their investments will not be so happy.

HOW TO WIN!

Penny auction has a lot of chance mixed into it, but one can incorporate strategy that will help raise the chances of winning. Playing smart can make all the difference between gambling and auctioning.

The first crucial tip to winning penny auctions is to know how to manage your bids. Your goal should be to win as much as possible without spending a ton of money buying bids. Managing your bids means that you should already know how much you are willing to risk in order to win an item. The amount of capital you are willing to risk will determine how many bids you can use. Once you know how many bids you have to spend on an item, then you will be better able to manage how and when you place a bid. That will keep you from blowing away all of your bids in the first few seconds of the auction.

The next tip is to practice time management. When fighting in the trenches of penny auctions, you have two enemies: other bidders and time. Knowing when to bid is a must if you want to have success. Placing a bid when there is a lot of time left on the clock is never a good idea. You have to remember that the key to winning a penny auction is being the last one standing when the clock runs out and that each bid increases the amount of time left. It would be a good practice to wait until the last few minutes of the auction before you begin to bid.

The final tip for successful auctioning is to keep your emotions under control.Auctions have a lot of similarities to gambling, and just like gambling, your spending can get out of control. If you keep your emotions level, it will keep you from making rash decisions and blowing loads of cash. Keep your mind clear so that you can gage the behavior of the other bidders and outsmart them.

HOW TO AVOID SCAM SITES!

Penny auctions are a great addition to the web whether you want to win an item that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to afford or if you simply enjoy the thrill that comes with bidding in auctions. Unfortunately, scam sites have tarnished the reputation of the legitimate penny auction sites. However, there are ways that you can protect yourself from scamers and enjoy your auctioning without having to worry about losing your money due to dishonesty.

Checking the reputation of the auction site before you start spending your hard earned money is always a good idea. Chances are other people have tried the site before you and some of them have left reviews. The reviews are your way to gage whether a auction site is trustworthy or not. If a site is getting overwhelmingly negative reviews, then that is a clear indication that you should steer your business elsewhere.

Another tool you can use to protect yourself is checking the Alexia ranks of the auction sites. Alexia rank will give a solid view of how much traffic the auction is getting. If you see a huge difference in the amount of traffic Alexia is projecting and the amount of active bidders on the site, then warning signals should be ringing in your head. Some auction sites have been known to set up robots that automatically bid on projects in order to keep the auction going and inflate the price. That is known as shill bidding. You can sniff out those sites by comparing the traffic the site should be getting to the amount of users using this site.

CONCLUSION!

New legislation may come out later down the road that will officially make penny auctions gambling, but until then, it is a fun, exciting auction that allows one to win the item they’ve always wanted but couldn’t afford.Auctions are also quite lucrative for the site owners because of the pay-per-bid strategy they’ve incorporated. Penny auctions had humble beginnings with farmers who just wanted to get back at the banks who kicked them out of their house. More recently, auctions have enjoyed an explosion in popularity with the rise of the internet.

There are two main formats fora auctions, lowest and highest unique auction, however they both run on the same premise where the last unique bid wins the item. Winning a penny auction will require a certain amount of mental tactic and a bit of luck. However, you can increase your odds of winning by practicing certain techniques such as managing your bids wisely, learning how to work with the time, and keeping a level head and your emotions under control. When you combine those three strategies to your bidding plan, you will find that you win a lot more often.

It is important that you do your due diligence to protect yourself when participating in auctions. Not every auction is run by honest and trustworthy people. There are people out there who just want to take your money. You can protect yourself by ensuring that you only bid on sites that already have a very positive reputation from real users.