Between the kids, your spouse, and your other responsibilities you barely have enough time to breathe let alone try to start a home based business. But your family could use the extra income and, even though things can get a little crazy at home, you would rather not get a job. Your only other option is to look at ways you can make money at home with a work at home business of some kind.The standard advice you’ll get from gurus about how to start a small home based business is to develop a business out of your existing skill set. For example, if you are a certified public accountant, then you would be encouraged to run an accounting business from your kitchen table.There several problems with this advice. First of all, what if you don’t want to make use of your current skills? What if the whole reason you quit your CPA job was because if you looked at one more ledger sheet you were going to scream? You will not be successful in a home based business you hate.Second, what if you don’t have any skills that you can draw from? You may be able to do lots of things but what if none of it could make you any money? If you took the advice of the gurus then you would have no business and still stuck at step one.But even if you could start a home business creating products or offering services for which you are fully skilled, is that really the best way to go?When you start a home based business, you are essentially beginning from scratch. There are numerous headaches involved with building a business from the ground up. Usually, there is licensing to obtain, product development and storage, customer acquisition, marketing and brand development, and a host of other things that must be done before your business gains the traction it needs to start making you money.Then there is the capital investment. Depending on the type of business you decide to create, you may have to invest thousands of dollars into your business before you even open your doors. The internet has made starting a home business easier and cheaper but if you don’t have any money, then you are still looking at putting in hundreds of hours of sweat equity.Lastly, most home based businesses are really work at home jobs in disguise. Since they require you to be actively involved in order to earn any money, your income will be tightly bound to the number of hours you work. This can be further complicated by the fact that you still have a household to run which means you may not have as much time available as you need to earn the income you want.A better way to start a home based business is to sign up with a direct sales opportunity. Otherwise known as network marketing, a direct sales business cuts out a lot of the challenges you face when trying to start a home based business from scratch. Investing in a direct sales opportunity is smart business because, you’ll have:* Less Startup Headaches – The company has already invested time and effort in getting the company off the ground. The products are created, marketing materials printed, and licenses purchased. All you have to do is find customers.* Lower Capital Investment – Instead of thousands of dollars, most direct sales businesses can be started with a hundred dollars or less.* Multiple Income Opportunities – In addition to selling the product directly, you will also be able to generate income through referrals and other passive income streams that help uncouple your time from your money. You’ll experience more personal freedom to do the things you want to do.If you are thinking about starting a home based business, don’t do it the hard way. Give yourself a leg up by joining a direct sales opportunity that will have you earning money right out of the gate. For more information on how I built my home based business, contact me. I’ll be more than happy to show you how I’m able to run a full time household and still make money in my business.
A Guide on Successful Product Creation and Internet Marketing
Product creation in Internet marketing is getting stiffer and stiffer nowadays owing to tough competition between Internet-based businesses. Putting up a new product requires plenty of brainpower and finances along with an ability to take risk. With that, even if you have the product well-set already, you have to position it strategically in the Internet landscape for others to notice. You should get the interest of Web users and turn them to actual customers. Aside from the usual physical products, many different products that thrive well on Internet marketing include E-books, membership sites, and video lectures.
The long and difficult process of product creation begins with ideas. They are easy to get – compared to the effort that comes with analyzing the market for that idea. Before the idea turns to a product, businesses often spend money, even amounting to millions of dollars, to ensure the success of the new product that emerges from an idea. Businesses undertake many types of market research and surveys before releasing their products to the public. Now, you may think that because your business is small, you can’t afford research or you don’t have to do research; you can and you should. The Internet allows you to disseminate materials needed for your market study to many people at once without your having to spend a cent.
It is a common maxim in business: Look at your destination first before mapping out your journey. So what are the goals you intend to accomplish with your product creation ventures? The everyday travails of your business may make you forget the end in sight. On the other hand, prepare to entertain new developments that come to your mind in your product creation. Your conception of a product may have started this way, but a few tweaks here and there along with some market research results and it ends up another way. Take it as the result of a creative process, not as a failure to reach your goal. After all, your product creation activities are intertwined with a long-term goal that you should strive to sustain at your utmost: profit generation. So if your less profitable initial idea evolves to a more profitable product, be thankful!
With your product made up already, start doing some aggressive Internet marketing. A product purchase typically comes after more than five times a customer is exposed to an informative call-to-buy message. Thus it is important to get the contact details, like the e-mail address, of potential customers who are on the brink of a sale. Use the results of your market research to determine the demographics to which you should concentrate your marketing efforts.
With consistent product creation, you can make an inventory of your products that you can market in due time. Just keep making products – the moment you succeed in making and marketing a product, customers are surely wanting more from you, so give it to them. Keep them on your side through constant product creation.
Plan To Succeed With Information Product Creation: Why You Need To Split Your Process Up
One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.
However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.
Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.
But why?
In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!
So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)
The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.
Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.
Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.
By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.
You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.