Home Business Ideas and Opportunities

Archive | June, 2015

Developing an Online Home Business Start-Up Plan

Be open to all possibilities, and/or keep an open mind while you are formulating a plan on how you will set-up your online home business. Don’t get stuck in a box, at least until you can really try on a few perspectives as to what kind of a business you will have. Then you can determine what that would involve to facilitate as part of a viable home business plan. See what develops. One thing for sure is that there are multiple facets to most really dynamic businesses – whether online or offline. There are many things to consider as you will realize over time, if you are really serious about building your own online business. It can be much more than you can see right now.

Planning

There was once a song that had lyrics that included something like “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you get what you need”. So you may have a vision or an idea of what you think your home business will be, and along the way you may discover additional as well as possible alternative techniques and strategies that you would also want to consider including. In time, maybe even a long time from now, you may change course as to which is the best way for you to go forward. At any given juncture in your business development plan you could discover another facet for your business structure and thereby develop an additional stream of income. ‘One brick at a time’.

It is always important to sit down and make a list of your interests and skills, as well as your specific work experience. Really think about what you did at each job you had. What did you do well; what did you like the best. Think of that in terms of the big picture as far as what your actions directly contributed to as part of the business process in that company. This is important so that you know what assets you have to work with. Another resource to consider is the amount of time you have to invest in learning how to and then implementing your business operations procedures; and of course going forward consider how much time you can commit to being engaged in running the business on a day-to-day basis, as well as factoring in time for technical and maintenance functions.

You have to decide how you will handle everything and determine whether you can afford to get any help in the way of online admin/support services, website design, marketing and advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), traffic and list building services, sales and tax accounting. To tell you the truth it is best if you know how to do things for yourself if possible. So even if you can pay someone to do it for you, now or later, you should take control of your own business by knowing how to do everything yourself, not to mention doing it free if you can. In most cases that would be a prerequisite because it seems most people try to start-up a home business when they have few resources in the way of money and sometimes even little time. So either way, you should definitely understand what is going on and what needs to be done so that you are in control.

To be honest starting up a successful online home business is not about how much money you have to invest, so much as it is about how serious, determined and focused you are in starting a real business that will pay you an income in the future. Remember starting-up is just square one. Many people are all fired up and ready to ‘byte the bullet’ (do whatever it takes to start a business); but then they don’t do anything else beyond set it up. They expect it to run itself and not cost them a single dime to operate.

Sometimes people expect everything for free yet they expect to make big money fast. They will be the first to pronounce the program a scam if they don’t see anything in a couple weeks or months. They will never acknowledge that they didn’t really take action and that is why nothing happened. They believe they really tried but what actually happened was a ‘half-hearted’ attempt quit too soon because the only concern was that they were spending a few dollars on membership fees.

So the first thing you should determine before you waste any time or money, is if you are really serious; and then to be sure you would be willing to make sacrifices in making your online home business one of your top priorities over the long-term. Do you have what it takes to stay motivated on your own and to focus on your business without being managed (self-supervision)? These are important considerations. There is nothing to feel guilty about if you don’t, as not everybody is an entrepreneur, and it is just best if you know what you really will or won’t do to get what you want.

0

Your Home Business: Starting Out on the Right Track

There is so much to learn when you first start trying to build a home business. It is of course natural to make mistakes since we are only human but then some mistakes are worse than others because they can permanently damage our reputation.

ethics

Some examples of the more serious issues are:

‘Ethical’ eMail Marketing is permission-based. That means that we never send anything to anyone who has not first requested information (“opted” in), and we have the documentation to protect ourselves from complaints. “Opt-in” means that they have willingly submitted their email address to you, which is giving you permission.

This documentation can include the person’s IP address, email address, date and time that the person opted-in. The person may ‘forget’ they requested the information and start marking your messages as spam. If the problem is escalated you need to be able to prove that you did not knowingly send anything that was not legal (requested).

Too many spam complaints can cause you a lot of trouble and depending on how severe the problem becomes, you can lose your domain, your hosting account and/or your autoresponder account. Spam is very illegal and that goes not only for the marketers that may send unsolicited advertising, but also to any system or application that allows the crime to be committed using their resources.

So this means that your providers, while they do not want to lose your business, are forced to drop you so that they are not seen as a ‘rogue’ system and lose their reputation with ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and ESPs (eMail Service Providers), etc., not to mention ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) – who made the law against spam and enforce it.

Another extremely important issue is being completely ethical and truthful in your advertising and dealing with your prospects and customers. Never make guarantees that you are not prepared to honor – for example if you guarantee someone will make X number of dollars; because if they don’t, then you are liable because you promised.

Of course what this means is do not guarantee anything you do not control. For real, because you would need to take that amount of money out of your pocket and give it to them to cover your ‘guarantee’, otherwise it would be ‘false advertising’.

You should never guarantee any amount of money or any amount of time. You do not know the future or what that person will do in terms of how much effort they will make that would determine how much they make or by when.

Another serious legal issue is ‘bait and switch’ – that means, for one example that you advertise one thing and then do another. For instance if your ad says someone will receive A,B, and C for X number of dollars. After they pay X, what they receive is not A,B and C but only A and they are told they need to give you more money to get B and C. Or it may be that A,B and/or C do not do what you promised and they need D,E or F to make it work.

Still another example is if you offer a full refund then you need to give the refund promptly. You can qualify that for example using a time constraint ’30-day money back guarantee’ or ‘refund is minus administrative, handling or shipping fee’. State exactly what you are prepared to honor.

Be very careful not to ‘bend’ the truth in these ways as there are lots of people who will take you to task for being less than completely honest. ‘Mean what you say and say what you mean’. The success of your business does depend on your reputation and the Internet and ‘social’ networks make it very easy for ‘the word’ to get around, whether positive or negative!

0

You Can Save So Much Money By Working From Home

Whether you can pull it off to work from home, either full or part-time, you will see how you can really start to get ahead by saving expenses. You will see in some situations it just doesn’t pay to work out of the home.

raining money

For two huge examples, gasoline and other commute expenses for travel to and from your job that you are not reimbursed by your employer; and child care – you can save hundreds of dollars by staying home with your kids. This is not even to mention the value to your child’s well being by having at least one parent who is there for them all the time.

Another way that you can see saving money by staying home to do your work is if you are locked into a salary or hourly wage; on the one hand you realize it is not possible to get an increase in pay until the next annual performance evaluation, and on the other the ‘cost of living’ and ‘merit’ increases are piddly at best. In some cases they are not a given so you may or may not be able to depend on it.

If you start a business of your own from home you are the one that determines how much you make or not and you can directly affect the bottom line by accelerating your actions to generate more income. So if you are like most average people you live pretty much paycheck-to-paycheck and you usually don’t have anything left over to save by the time you pay all your bills. What you need then is a second income from working from home to increase the amount you are able to save.

Saving is so important on many different levels – saving for a specific reason or not, it really makes sense to have something to ‘fall back on’ if nothing else. We never know when there will be something unexpected that requires extra money which is on top of our normal expenses without a corresponding increase in income!

…Or just to be able to reward yourself from time to time by splurging on a vacation or going first-class. Even having ‘mad money’ which is so much fun to spend, is a good reason to have a second income. There has to be more to life than just mere drudgery day in and day out. We should be enjoying life and the truth is many of us can’t afford to do so. That is a real tragedy.

Many people who are nearing retirement age now saw so many twists and turns with their investments and pensions over the past few decades that they really wish they had used their younger, more productive years to save money for their retirement. So many things that people depended on to be there are not there at least to the degree that they were assumed to be. People are not able to retire completely until they are really way beyond ‘normal’ retirement age. Actually for them it is just perfect to work from home to earn money to supplement their retirement income.

So everybody from families with young children to older folks can greatly improve their lifestyle and level of security by saving money by working from home either part or full time. Get started today!

0
Home Business Ideas and Opportunities

Powered by Plug-In Profit Site

Plug-In Profit Site