Now that you have picked your area to focus on and build a business around, let’s continue with the practicalities of owning and operating your home-based business.Business Insurance
Depending on the type of business you decided to start, there may be different type of insurance you will need. Find out exactly what that is, shop around for good prices and a reputable insurance company and make sure you are covered.Business Computer
It’s best to get a separate computer for your business, especially if you have a family. This way you will be able to deduct 100% of your computer costs without having to keep track of the time it is used for business vs. personal use. Also, as smart as you kids may be, you still don’t want them anywhere near your business accounting records.Hire a Babysitter
If you have children and plan to start a home-based business in order to stay at home with them, think again. Also, if your wife is working and you are trying to save money on daycare by having the Dad work from home and watch the kids at the same time, I warn you in advance.First of all, this is not in the best interest of your children. Work is and should be very consuming and someone whose attention is (hopefully) fully focused on the job at hand is simply not in a position to give adequate attention to kids and supervise them properly.Conversely, someone who is busy with the children will not be doing a good job with a customer on the phone, or performing any other business-related task. Your mind has to be a 100% on the business, otherwise you might as well call it a hobby.One of the things home-based businesses have to pay particular attention to is a professional image. There is nothing more damaging to that then hearing a child crying in the background as a customer, a vendor or any of your professional contacts is trying to have a business conversation with you.Set up Boundaries
Another challenge some home-based business owners face are constant interruptions from family members. If you don’t find a way to eliminate this, you may have to rent an office. The only way to successfully work from your home-based office is if you really manage to make it an “office” and not your living room, kitchen or a den.You will need large blocks of time where no personal interruptions should come into play at all. Just think of yourself as a boss of an employee who is constantly on his or her cell phone having personal conversations. It is the same thing. The time you spend working on your business needs to be dedicated to business and not watered down by constant intrusions of your personal life.The same goes for your private time. Guard it just as you do your working time. This is the other side of the home-based business equation – some people never stop working and their families forget what they look like. Decide how much you need or want to work and then be done. Rejoin the human race, have fun with your kids, take them to a movie, go for a walk, have a nice life. You don’t have to answer every call that comes in after 7 PM. Imagine you are simply not there. Pretend you’ve closed the office for the night…Keeping these two spheres of your life separate and yet both properly attended to will go a long way in ensuring that your home-based business will be a success.
Starting a Home Based Business – Checklist – Part 2
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.
Effective Marketing Strategies in Product Creation
Marketing includes matters such as pricing and packaging of the product and creation of demand by advertising and sales campaigns. There are other options, of course, like product creation, resale rights marketing, joint ventures and the likes, but they are merely secondary to the above.
If you take the freelance route, it is important to ensure that all rights to profit from the final product, or any materials produced in its making, remain yours. Bookkeeping, physical product creation or delivery of goods can be done better with specialized help. Determining the purpose of the product is vital in niche product creation.
Implementation of Methodology – The choice of implementation of Six Sigma methodology depends on whether development is required on existing processes (DMAIC) or on new process/product design creation (DMADV). Determining what you really want to sell, something that you can be relaxed selling is the first step at the creation of a niche product. With the technological advancements in the hosting industry, from automated control panels and scripts that simplify creation of accounts; to complete turnkey solutions, there is no excessive need to worry about spending time on the actual product sold to the customer.
For instance, you should be prepared to either perform yourself or to subcontract the completion of the following tasks:- Product idea research (are there any existing products or patents already existing for this idea)- Product specification document training (what it will do, how it will look, how will it be powered, and how the user will interface with it)- Marketing study (what it will be named, who would buy this, how much would they pay, how will we get customers to purchase the product)- Schematic or electronic circuit design process- Creation of a bill of material or BOM and an approved vendor’s list or AVL for each component in the design, preferably with multiple sources identified, with a BOM and AVL for each assembly level in the product- Printed circuit board layout design process (single sided board, double sided board, or multilayer board; size of the PCB; board material)- Mechanical packaging design with user interfaces (displays, buttons, switches, key. This removes all product creation costs from your budget as a marketer.
No other database of affiliate programs offers such a possibility for profit on either the affiliate side or the product creation site. Your chosen niche should allow for the creation of more than one product or service.
There are several marketing strategies that are necessary in the creation of a successful e-commerce web site – Email marketing (broadcasting) of prospects/customers – Effective use of auto responders (generate automatic email messages) – Online Newsletter – Online Form / Survey to capture your prospect’s email address – Electronic Product Delivery (if you sold a digital product) – Advertisement (Ad) Tracking – Back End Sales – Affiliate program etc.