Tips To Operating A Home Based Legitimate Business Online

This article exposes practical day to day tips in maintaining and operating your home based legitimate business online to it's optimum. These are tips from my own personal experiences after being a full time internet marketer for a few years now. Though logical and simple, they are often overlooked by even the more experienced home based business online owners.

Let's start with your computer. How old is it? If it's more than 4 years old, up-grade it if you can or better still change it. Look, you don't want to run an online business with an unreliable computer. Trust me you, this will be worth it. A little tip before on purchasing a new computer. If it runs on Windows Vista, make sure the RAM size is 2GB or more. Lower than that and your computer will be sluggish. If you are a notebook person like me, make sure to test the screen size you are most comfortable with. A 13.3inch is the smallest I would go. Smaller than that and it will hurt your eyes.

Are you promoting affiliate programs? I promote loads of them and that's why I keep a database of all the programs I am affiliated to in a simple spreadsheet. I include in it the affiliate manager's url, my affiliate links, login ID, login password, their support email addresses, email address I used to subscribe to them, payment gateways, payment received, payment pending and remarks. This will give you an easy reference and a good way to monitor your paychecks. OpenOffice offers a free spreadsheet software download at their homepage.

With the exception of IT personnels, this is the one thing most people do not do. As a home based legitimate business online owner, your database is your goldmine. For example, I keep a database of my newsletter subscribers, affiliate programs (above) and hosting directories. You should too and always keep a back up copy of them in a secondary storage device like an external hard drive. You can also burn them in a DVD-ROM or CD-ROM. To make your job easier, store all your critical files in a common directory. I store all my home based business online stuff in a folder called "IM" for internet marketing. When I do a backup, I just copy the whole file. Simple right.

Here's another one. Test the availability of your site at least once a day. Make sure your site opens up when you enter your site url in the web browser. After it does, do a random check on the links you have on your site to ensure there are no broken links. If there are then fix them. The links could have been changed without your knowledge. There are softwares available in the market you can use to check this for you, but a random manual check is recommended. The plus point to this is, you tend to spend more time on your site hence, can easily identify discrepancies and rectify them if any.

Above are some of the more important tips that I have used and still am using to ensure the smooth running of my home based legitimate business online. Though not often being highlighted as part of a marketing strategy, yet can mean the survival of your home based business online venture.