Just 1 short year ago I was a ‘newbie’ – a complete and utter novice, I was not just wet behind the ears I was soaking. Now 1 year down the line here I am creating my own sites, blogging, networking on Myspace & Facebook & ‘tweeting’ on Twitter.

The primary reason I decided to work from home was to give me more time & flexibility and to allow me to earn more money than I had been doing. In the process of doing this I could also help others to do the same, so it was perfect. It is fair to say that in this time I have learned fast and grown a lot and as a result of this my business has grown too. I am now in the enviable position of being able to help others to achieve just as I have.

I learned very early on that one of the main reasons of failure is lack of money/cash flow. In the early days where you are in the process of just setting up your business, web sites, online presence etc. there is a time delay between significant cash out & cash in. This is the time where a positive cash flow is critical to survival. If you can survive this then hopefully you will stay in the game. I have been there and know that awful sinking feeling of impending doom and disaster only days away yet I knew my instincts were telling me it would be ok and just to keep ‘believing’ and keep ‘doing’ and it would be ok – and it was.

I learned to do Pay Per Click advertising through Google & Yahoo. The feeling of euphoric satisfaction I got when leads started coming through my system at a good price was amazing. However, this feeling was nothing compared to what I felt just last month when I realised that 14% of my prospects now coming through are FREE. Yes you read this correctly – Free. What this means to me is that all the hard work I have been putting in since the summer has started to pay off.

I began by setting up my own personal web site so that prospects could read about me and not just my business opportunity, then I added a blog so that they could follow me on a regular basis and see the progress. I then took a deep breath, bought a camcorder and joined Youtube. I would never have thought it possible that I would be posting my own videos to Youtube – but I now do this regularly and what is more I love doing them. I joined Myspace and Facebook and the community on Betternetworker.com and then just last month began posting articles to Ezine articles.com. In short I began to put into practice what Mike Dillard has called ‘attraction marketing’.

All of these methods combined now provide me with free visitors to my sites and in turn some of these translate into free prospects for my business.

Pay per click is a great way of driving traffic to your site but once that visitor has gone you have paid money and it is gone. Once you have placed videos, articles, blogs etc. out on the internet they are there for months and years to come still getting visitors and readers driving them to your sites for free.

This figure of 14% is set to increase as I increase my efforts in this area & instead of cutting back on my paid forms of marketing I intend to increase these too. The more qualified visitors in total you can generate to your site, the more sales you will generate. But remember, the greater the percentage of prospects you can generate for free the better your profitability will become.