Running a home based business offers the best of both worlds – low cost as well as the satisfaction of doing something of your own. Most home based businesses are either franchises or involve internet-based operations. A home based business offers the flexibility of running your own show without bearing the high risks associated with other business ventures.How to Manage Your Home Based Business
A grave issue with home base businesses is the inability to separate work and family life. People usually venture into home-based businesses to spend more time with their families. However, in the absence of proper time management, family-time could hinder business processes. Hence, it is imperative to organize your day by creating a schedule and sticking to it.Other issues that need to be managed for running a home based business successfully are:
o Strain on relationships: Running a home business can be very challenging. Therefore, it is necessary to communicate with your spouse and children about your goals. Also, establish certain ground rules to ensure that your privacy is not compromised.
o Getting over-worked: A home based business owner often gets consumed by his/her work. The temptation to work for long hours is irresistible as there are no fixed working hours or daily targets. Hence, you must establish daily plans to resist being overworked.
o Housing regulations: Some housing associations, especially those of apartments and condominiums, do not tolerate business activities beyond a certain level. Hence, review the restrictions governing your business before venturing into one. Consider moving into a separate location for uninterrupted business operations.Finally, keep in mind that the most important aspect that needs to be managed is the ‘self.’ Since there is no one to supervise you, the success of your business depends solely on your discipline.Tips for Home Based Business Marketing
Expanding your network is the most important strategy for marketing your home based business. The primary source of advertising and referrals in case of home businesses are friends and family. You can also get in touch with prospective customers through numerous other sources, such as the local chamber of commerce, trade shows, PTA meetings and corporate conferences.Other cost-effective advertising channels for home businesses are:
o Direct mail. It is a cost-effective method to appeal to a large customer base. However, to optimize this channel, ensure that your direct-mail looks professional and is informative.
o Affiliate programs. Online affiliate programs enable you to reach a wide range of prospective customers through commission-based sales, without the hassle of supervising actual employees.
o Newsletters. By providing interesting and informative content with respect to the product offering, you can convert the subscriber into buyers as they feel that they can rely on your company for quality information and products. If you are unable to manage the newsletters yourself, consider submitting your articles to various publications.
o Pay per click advertising. A cost-effective advertising tool, PPC helps to advertise on various relevant websites. You needn’t pay for the advertising space; rather you will only pay when a customer clicks on your link in those websites.Finally, the rising popularity of social networking sites has opened up a lucrative marketing channel, which can be used to advertise your home based business free of charge.

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.

Many people enter a job market right after school and jump right into life feet first. Money comes in from a job, then goes right out to liabilities, food, entertainment… all necessities and pleasures in life. This is often called being stuck in a “rat race”. Every month is the same thing… money comes in, money goes out. Once you’re stuck in it, it’s very difficult to get out. But not impossible.

Now, money you make in your job is dependent on your ability to perform a task or function and amount of time put into that task or function. Essentially, it is trading time for money utilizing a learned skill. But this can’t possibly go on forever, can it? What happens when you get too old to perform these same tasks required for a job?

Unfortunately, for some people it goes on for a very long time. And when people who don’t invest in things that will bring in income whether they work or not can’t work any more, they don’t have anything to help them live as comfortably as they are today.

Until most people get into a career job that offers good benefits (including a 401k), money is rarely put toward investments. Money is made and spent as fast as it’s made, giving a person necessities and comforts of life at the time – and then some, but not allowing much for a prosperous future once job income stops.

Everyone at some point in their life must face the reality that a job is not going to give them everything they want or need in life – especially a life after retirement age. Investing is something best figured out early in life.

To understand how important investing is, you must first understand what investing is. An investment is a method of making money from a one-time effort. Sometimes this effort can be intense and take some time, but it can provide income for many years to come without having to put forth that same effort or time.

If you do a bunch of research to buy a house to use as an investment, you only have to do that research one time. Once you buy an investment, it will make money for you with very little effort. If you write a book and put it on a website to sell, you only had to write a book one time and it will make money for as long as it is active on the website or in a book store. If you research a company stock and find a perfect one, investing some money in it, money then starts doing work and making money without you having to do anything.

These are just simple investment examples that do take some effort. The point is that making money from investments is a lot easier than making money at a job if you know what you’re doing. A huge difference between an investment and a job is how much time and effort someone has to put into making money. Cool thing about investing in the stock market (whether it be traditional buy/hold/sell trading, 401k investing, or options) is that you only have to learn how to do it once, keep repeating what you learned, and let each dollar you invest do all of the rest of the work for you so you can enjoy life as it was intended.

Of course there is one HUGE problem that everybody faces before they can invest. Where do you get money to use to make money? When living life in a “rat race”, you eventually get caught up in an impossible circle that is very hard to get out of.

Don’t worry!

You have money… you just don’t know it yet!

There are ways to make a few changes in your life to start building up “capital” for investing – no matter what type of investing you are looking to start. It will be slow at first, but it will definitely morph into something you won’t believe possible.

One way to build up investment capital fairly quickly is opening a “Round Up” Savings Account. This type of capital growing account actually helps you save and build money based on your every day purchases. You attach your checking accounts or credit cards that you spend money on to your Round Up account and for each purchase you make, this account rounds up to the nearest dollar and deposits that rounded up cash into an investment platform that helps your savings grow faster. Not much work, is it? This special investment account does the rest.

For example, if you spent $20.57 on something, it rounds that up to $21.00. The round up, or $0.43, is placed in your account which is divided among several stocks based on account settings.

If you make 50 purchases from your checking account in a month averaging $0.35 a round up, you will save $17.50 in that month. That’s $210.00 in a year saved just by rounding up these purchases.

Money invested in this round up account goes up and down with stock market movement. At 5% gain in a year, it will go up by $10.50 more. And some stocks that your money is invested in earn dividends that are automatically reinvested into your account.

This doesn’t sound like much, but over time, it will continue to grow. This is an investment in itself and can grow pretty fast if you are consistently adding to it. If you have extra money you’d like to save during a month, you can also make deposits to apply them to your account to grow your account even faster.

A Round Up Savings Account is simply a stepping stone to get you to a higher level of investing, which can be a stock trading, option trading, a retirement investment account, real estate, or anything else you can invest that money in to make more money.

Once you build up some good investment capital in your Round Up account, you can withdraw it whenever you want and use it to purchase assets (things that earn you money – unlike liabilities) or to invest in stocks to make even more money over time.